


Over the Hills and Far Away

by Dory2007



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Western, Cowboy AU, Cowboys, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mild Language, Period-Typical Homophobia, Romance, Wild West, and jean is a shy dork loser, bartender marco, cowboy jean, in which marco is a shy freckled cutie, levihan yumikuri and springles in the background, like at first sight, lots of gay feelings tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dory2007/pseuds/Dory2007
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean Kirschstein is a nineteen year old outlaw living the dusty life of a cow rustler in the American Old West of 1873 Texas.  He's been running the crime ring for eight years, working with fellow ringleaders Eren Jaeger, Mikasa Ackerman, and Armin Arlert to make the whole operation run smoothly without anyone getting caught and jailed--or worse, hanged.  The crew steals a few cows at a time and delivers them to an under the table "business" called Survey Corp. in return for a fat paycheck.<br/>On the run from the Santa Maria police, the crew robs the Leonhardt Ranch and hauls ass out west to sell their cattle and finally take a rest.  But when the cops come dangerously close to catching up to them, Jean bolts to a tiny, run-down town in the middle of nowehere, where a certain freckled bartender with a cute smile and a cuter ass is trying his damned hardest to create his own definition of freedom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Grand Theft Bovine

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so i got this cowboy Jean idea and i literally could NOT let go of it so i figured if i wanted to read this story i'd just have to write it myself. This is the first time I've ever written anything longer than a school paper AND my first fanfic, so i really hope it turns out well. I will try to update this when I can; it looks like it's gonna get done on a chapter every two weeks basis. Is all this cowboy and rustling history 100% accurate? I've got no idea. I was not a cow rustler in 1873 Texas.  
> But enough chitchat.  
> Here we go. Ride 'em, cowboy.

The first streak of morning light was just beginning to peep over the faraway horizon when Jean Kirschstein finally managed to pick the lock on the pasture gate.

“Shit,” he cursed beneath his breath as the bottom of the eastern sky slowly turned lavender gray. “We're workin' too damn slow.”

He cast a nervous glance to the big white ranch house behind him, where still-darkened windows reassured him that all was well in the dreaming heads of the rich ranching folk he was about to swindle out of four good cows.

“We're good!” Jean whispered hoarsely back to his partners, who were crouched silently beyond the fence, their silhouettes blending seamlessly into the final clinging shadows of the night. Their horses, wagon, and small group of other cattle had been tied up safely in a nearby copse, waiting for the rustlers to return with their stolen bounties and ride like hell out west.

Giving Jean a thumbs-up, Armin Arlert began to ease his small, lithe body over the fence of the pasture; though the door was now technically open, showing that fact to the cows wasn't always the best idea. If they spooked, things might get messy.

Armin landed easily on the ground with a soft _whump_ , his boots and the hems of his pant legs pressing into the rich dark soil, likely gathering material for future stains. He began to make his way slowly to one sizable female with large dewy eyes, gesturing silently for crew members Eren Jaeger and Mikasa Ackerman to follow his lead. All the while, Jean kept a simultaneous watch on both the door and the house.

 

As his friends worked their calming magic on the docile animals, Jean let his thoughts wander a bit. It was still much too dark out for anyone important in the big house to be awake and alive, and after all, he hadn't slept in almost twenty-four hours. It had been his turn to drive the cattle, soothing their worried moos and guiding their wandering hooves back to the sorry excuse for a path they'd been following for a week. Even their cook Sasha, ball of energy that she was, was starting to feel the company's strain. An unusually cruel Texas heat wave was rising, baking and burning the gentle spring beneath the oncoming summer sun, and everyone and everything in the Cadet trail drive could feel it.

 _Well, if you can really call us trail drivers_ , mused Jean, whose eyelids felt as if they were made of lead more and more with each passing minute. _Rustlers sounds more exciting anyway._

He let out a large yawn, stretching toned, honey-colored arms above his head and looking around once more at the slowly lightening pre-dawn sky. A dappled cow heard the noise and looked at him balefully, slowly chewing on grass.

“What's your problem?” mumbled Jean reproachfully, his words melting into noises that became more incoherent the longer he spoke. Jean nuzzled his head against the suddenly comfortable rough wooden post of the pasture fence. “Sometimes people just wanna be left  _alone."_

Turning away from the cow, Jean struggled to force his eyes open. It was really a beautiful night; the crickets were humming, the wind was singing in the tall, swaying fields of prairie grass between the gently rolling hills, the air was cool and clear, and the Cadets' plan was going fairly well. He blinked tiredly at the last straggling stars barely hanging onto the final remnants of night in the west and thought about what their next strategy should be. Right now, caution was more important than anything.

 

They'd been canvassing Texas for about three weeks now, working on this year's roundup of new calves and birth-ready mothers for delivery to a sleazy, under-the-table buyer called Survey Corporation for their payment and the city of Santa Rosa, New Mexico's beef. Thomas and Mina had split off from the group already to take ten cows back to the secret ranch they kept near the border of the Indian Territory, Texas, and New Mexico, which Hanna and Franz watched over while the others were out nabbing the cattle. It had been a good year for a while; the rain in the spring came down harder and more frequently than it usually did; the locals in the towns they'd been passing through were more friendly than they usually were. It wasn't until the past week that their situation started going south.

It happened when they were passing through a tiny, ramshackle cow town called Shiganshina, started by Japanese immigrants who'd chased the gold in California twenty years ago and kept moving east when the riches ran dry. Armin had been watching their cattle at at the outpost one night while Eren and Jean went out for cheap drinks at the local bar.

Armin had run up the dusty road to the bar, forcing himself to calm down as he hurriedly pushed open the warped wooden double doors and tracked down Jean at the table he shared with Eren. With his brain fogged up by whiskey and beer, it took Jean a moment to process Armin's words.

“Jean, Eren, did you hear what I said?”

Armin shot Jean a resentful glare, eyes flashing in annoyance. The older man was bent over a bottle in the shitty little bar, head swirling with spirits, not paying attention to a word that came out of the skinny blond man's mouth. Eren let out a drunken hiccup and laughed.

Jean remembered giving Armin what he considered to be his best bitch scowl... but then the alcohol got the better of him and his straight-lipped frown loosened into a lazy, toothy grin.

In a fit of spite, Armin snagged the brown glass bottle from Jean's limp hand. Jean let out an outraged cry and started to say something—he couldn't recall now what that something had been; most likely an insult—but Armin cut him off, smacking a small, insistent hand on the wooden table.

“Jean Kirschstein. Eren Jaeger. Listen to me, you drunken shits. I was watching our—” Armin looked around the bar with an anxious expression on his face, “—things, and a policeman from the station in the next town over handed me this.” He thrust a faded piece of paper onto the table. Though the dirtiness and sun-faded toning of the document made it difficult to see, it was clear it had once been part of a newspaper for the city of Santa Maria, Texas. The byline read May 29 th , 1873, a date from just over a week before. Two poorly fashioned sketches took up the center of the page. Underneath, there was a large, thickly bolded caption declaring:

 

IF YOU HAVE SEEN THESE MEN, PLEASE REPORT THEM TO THE SANTA MARIA CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT. WANTED ON CHARGES OF CATTLE RUSTLING AND PETTY THEFT. REWARD OF ONE HUNDRED UNITED STATES DOLLARS FOR EITHER'S CAPTURE.

 

Though the quality of the drawings was questionable, they were undoubtedly depictions of Jean and Eren. No one with any sense could mistake Jean's two-toned undercut and long, thin face and Eren's large, intense eyes.

Armin looked at Jean and Eren again, this time with worry evident in his round blue eyes. “He said he was handing them out all over town.”

“Shit,” cursed Jean, muttering quiet obsceneties to himself, scared into sobriety by the thought of being caught. He'd be found guilty no matter how they tried him. “Shit shit shit, Armin. What do we do?”

“Get up now, pay whatever tab you have, and bring yourselves back to the inn. We're gettin' out of here tonight,” Armin murmured in a gravelly voice out of the corner of his mouth. He purposefully shook his straight blond hair across his face, hiding his expression from any too-curious patrons of the bar. He reached into the pocket of his blue jeans and forked out some cash as the two other men did the same, then hauled them from their rickety chairs and led them like cows out the bar door.

“These two have had  _way_ too much to drink tonight!” called Armin in a loud, carefree voice to the bartender, who waved them away, thanking them for their service. Jean and Eren played along, smiling and laughing as if something was funny. Once they were out on the street, however, every face fell like a ton of bricks. 

“Go now,” Armin said, his voice quiet and forceful. His eyes were distant as he calculated a plan of action, staring at a nearby building facade without really seeing it.

“Grab your things from the inn. Tell Christa and Ymir to get out of bed and send Sasha to me to help me pack. Mikasa's watching the cows in my stead, so don't worry about her. Have Connie pay for the rooms. Explain to the innkeepers that Ymir has fallen ill and that we're taking her to Dauper for medical treatment. Be as fast as you possibly can.”

Then Armin pushed them roughly away by their shoulders and started walking briskly towards the cow pasture. His hands' tight grip on each other behind his back were the only indication that anything was wrong.

Jean looked at Eren with panicked hazel eyes. This sort of thing had only ever happened once before, and it had been years ago, back when they first got started, before they had any idea what they were doing. But crime came simpler back then, when the law was lost in the dissonant fury of the freshly post-war South, and they managed to escape scot-free. Now it was 1873. The wounds in the southern earth were healing, even if they were still fresh in the hearts of the people, and the great institution of the law was regaining its strength, which made Jean Kirschstein's life all that much harder.

“Let's move,” Eren hissed under his breath, setting off back towards the inn as fast as his short legs could carry him with Jean following behind.

After that, the night was a anxiety-tinged blur. Fear made Jean's heart pound while alcohol warred against it, attempting to make his head sluggish and thick. All the Cadets' expressions were tight with unease, and the quick smiles they shot to the other travelers in the inn seemed weak and stretched.

Up in the room he shared with Connie, Jean's body went on autopilot. He began shoving his things into his saddlebags roughly, packing his small suitcase full of everything else he owned, clearing the room of trash, running down the stairs with feet pounding rhythmically and loud until he reached the wagon and the horses. When he finally stopped moving, he was so winded that he almost fell asleep on horseback as they rode away into the night, moon shining on the desert behind them.

 

 

And that was why Jean was here this morning, leaning with a bowed back on a wooden fence, raiding just one last cattle ranch before stopping in some other tiny, shitty town. They'd been running nonstop for a week, following a trail that was barely even there in the hopes that no one would find them. The band of rustlers was trying to distance themselves from Shiganshina and Santa Maria as fast as they possibly could, but they still had to garner enough stock to sell to Survey, so here they were.

Ranch. Nighttime. Head-on-fence.

Eren and Mikasa slowly led a female cow past him. They nodded silent hellos to Jean and continued on their way, creeping off fairly gracefully for two people accompanied by a clumsy, heavyset cow.

Jean's tired eyes flicked up to the stars again and he let out a sigh, blowing the longer top part of his undercut out of his eyes with a  _whuff_ of air. The great bowl of the mid-Texas sky sat immobile and cloudless in the air, little pinpricks of light going out every second as the sun spilled itself against the navy backdrop of night. Thoughts chased each other around his head, shifting into images that crashed against each other and metamorphosed into new things and ideas until Jean drifted off on the gentle tide of exhausted sleep.

~ ~ ~

Jean awoke with a start to the touch of a hand on his shoulder. He sat bolt upright with his pistol drawn and ready and was greeted by the sight of a disapproving Mikasa.

“ _Jean_ ,” she said for the third time, shaking him awake just a bit harder than was necessary. Jean swore that he could _hear_ her frown when he closed his eyes to avoid her disdainful expression. “Jean. There's a candle in one of the help's downstairs windows. We've got the cows, and we're ready to leave, but Jean, you have to get up  _right now_ .”

“What?” gasped Jean, shocked out of dreamland and back into his reality; he couldn't have dozed for more than two minutes—but looking around, he saw the darkness had receded more than ten minutes would have allowed for. The sun was beginning to poke its glowing head above the horizon, and the rest of the sky had turned a rather ugly shade of mauve.

Jean began to feel panic bubbling up in his throat. Thievery had its moments of glamor in the papers when the heroic policemen rounded up the heartless, notorious criminals, but for the outlaws themselves, one wrong move could translate into some trigger happy sheriff giving you a gunshot wound that makes sure you're only gonna be famous for dying.

“You heard her!” Eren hissed at Jean, grabbing the other man's forearm with a tanned, scarred hand and dragging him unceremoniously up off the ground, gripping tightly enough to leach the blood from Jean's skin.

“Where's Armin?” breathed Jean, raking his hands through his hair.

“He's safe, in the trees,” Mikasa responded levelly, but Jean knew her well enough to hear the undertone of urgency in her voice. “Christa and Ymir and Sasha and Connie are with him. They have all the cows. Come on.” She started running into the murky grayness that had been night half an hour ago, with Eren following her closely, matching her strides.

Jean cursed himself internally for falling asleep on watch. If they got caught, they had enough stolen property to warrant hanging in most towns in the area. He took off after the others towards the trees and the hills, running full tilt for their relative safety in the sea of grass.

It was times like this, when the Cadets cut it too close to the wire, when someone was in danger of being caught and jailed— or worse— that Jean began regretting his choice of career.  _But then,_ Jean rationalized,  _it's not like I_ had _much of a choice to begin with._

Cattle multiplies on its own. Money doesn't. At least, not for the working poor, and that's what Jean would have been if he'd accepted the hand dealt to him by the government and society during the first few years of peace. That was why Jean and his friends had started this “business” in the first place; after the War of Northern Aggression and the re-composition of the Union, Jean and most everyone he knew from home had nothing. Eren, Armin and Mikasa had no parents. Sasha's sister and mother were dead. Mina lost all her brothers fighting. Thomas's aunt, his last living relative, had died of typhoid. Connie's father came back as an amputee and had later committed suicide when he buckled under the stress of readjustment to normal life. Christa and Ymir took care of each other because there was simply no one else left. And Jean— Jean gave up on finding his father long ago. It didn't take him long to realize what “missing in action” really meant.

 

The problem with tragedy is that the world goes on spinning anyway, even when you feel like you've been stabbed in the stomach and the bleeding won't cease no matter how hard you press the wound. It doesn't stop for dead parents, for burned cities, for mass graves of soldiers that died in vain fighting neighbors or brothers or disease. The world doesn't stop for an eleven year old boy, no matter how scared and lost he is, no matter how hard his knobbly knees shake and how far south his moral compass is pointing him when he steals his first loaf of bread just to have a meal that day.

The world didn't stop for Jean Kirschstien, and it won't stop for anyone, anywhere. Ever.

 

Eventually, everyone in the Cadets crime ring had found their way to the same dilapidated little homestead in western Texas. The kids had to make a living somehow, and with no skills under their belts at the tender ages of ten and eleven, they didn't have many options. They could learn a trade, but there were so many children left parentless as a byproduct of the war. Every child wanted the same thing they had wanted, and no adults had room for them. All that was left for them was to become farm laborers, spending their days frying under the Texas sun, doing hard work for little pay. That life didn't appeal to anyone. The cattle rustling operation was a silly yet brilliant idea of Armin's that had grown into a reality over the course of a year. Good pay, a bit of excitement every now and then, and travel all were part of the job description, and everything was fine unless they got caught, which was highly unlikely. At the time, it had seemed like the best option, and for some reason, they'd never stopped.

So here they all were, years later, working the justice system and lining their wallets with a modest income. Sure, they were covered in dust ninety percent of the time, and their lives were dangerous, but they were doing better for themselves than most.

_Action speaks louder than words, but the dollar bill speaks loudest of all_ , thought Jean sardonically as he hauled his ass toward the trees where Connie and Sasha were already packing up the wagon, throwing supplies wherever they would fit. The oxen were ready to pull, the horses were ready to ride, the cows were calm and ready to be lead, and Jean was fifteen feet from the cluster of woods when a curtain was abruptly ripped away from a top floor window in the ranch house. Someone must have woken up early; a candle was lit up quickly, its feeble yellow light glowing pallidly against the dawn sky that was purpling like a bruise. 

As Jean crested the first and lowest of the hills, his head whipped around to inspect this new light. A dark figure was backlit by the candle, its identifying features rendered indecipherable by distance.

Inside the house, the person frowned as he reached for his wash basin. It looked like something was moving in the shadows of the hills near the small group of trees by the cow pasture.

Then the figure was gone from the window and Jean thought he was safe, home free—  _the trees, they're here, they're_ here _, we can make it, it's only me that's still running_ . Flashes of thoughts and images sped through his mind as he pushed himself the few extra steps into the copse, hurriedly clambering on top of his horse that someone had considerately thought to saddle for him. He looked around at his crew and counted under his breath again: “Eren, Armin, Mikasa, Me, Ymir, Christa, Sasha, Connie, we're all here, we're all safe—”

 

In the house, Bertholdt Hoover, resident cow hand, began getting ready for another long, dirty day on the Leonhardt Ranch. He dressed slowly, sleepily, pulling on his shirt and his pants; his belt, his boots, his wide-brimmed hat. There was an oddly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, reminding of him of the time he'd tried to pick up a rope on the floor of the stables before realizing he'd almost grabbed a live rattlesnake.

Bert cast a nervous glance out the window. Something wasn't right out there.

For the first time in a long time, Bertholdt Hoover forced himself to pick up his gun.

 


	2. When the Sun Goes Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jean shaves, gets hit on, and tries desperately to be smooth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh dear god it's one in the morning and i have to get up at five thirty for school and my neck hurts so bad lord help me
> 
> v. sorry about all the exposition last chapter!! It's gonna come together, you'll see
> 
> Also, a most sincere thank you to everyone who has read, commented, and kudosed on this work. I love you all; this really means a lot to me :)

Jean grabbed his horse's reigns tightly in his fist as he spurred her hard in the side, shifting his weight forwards as she began to canter away from the Leonhardt Ranch. His body bumped against the saddle in time to the horse's fluid rhythm, years of practice evident in the ease with which he rode. He hated not being able to push it and bolt for cover, but as far as he knew, cows didn't gallop.

Jean shot a quick look over his shoulder towards the others as Armin and Eren rode up to flank him on either side. The light of the ranch hand's window shrank to the size of a water droplet, to a speck of dust, and then to nothing as the gradually sloping hills flew by them.

“Where are we going?” Jean shouted, his hair blowing back in the wind, the cold dawn air stinging his face. The ever-present frown crinkles around his eyes deepened as he addressed Armin beside him.

“I don't know.” Armin spoke truthfully, his face set in determination. He knew it was his job to deliver everyone safely, as well as protect their stock. The employees of Survey Corporation all possessed the necessary skin-deep politeness of any self-respecting Southerner, but that didn't mean they'd hesitate to shoot you dead if you didn't follow through on a deal.

Armin kept his eyes fixed on the pale purple horizon as he planned their next move inside his head. “We just need to get out of here for right now.”

“We can check out the map in a few hours once we've put some decent distance between us and that place,” Eren chimed in from the left.

Behind the three leaders, the wagon and the other riders rolled along, whooshing through the sweeping sea of grass that blanketed the shallow hills and valleys that surrounded them. The Cadets quickly became blips on the skyline as they persuaded their lumbering, skittish bounties across the rolling terrain, dissolving into the ever-lightening distance like fog beneath the sun.

~ ~ ~

“But we have to split up!”

Eren pushed his tanned hands into his scruffy dark brunet hair as he paced back and forth in the dirt, circling a small clump of dead-looking scrub bushes. The tips of his boots were caked with the stuff, and it was making him _angry_ , dammit. “You gotta know it's our only option left, Armin. You gotta know that!”

“I do know that, Eren,” Armin replied stolidly, studying the yellowed vellum map he held in his hands. He wasn't about to let a dumb Jaeger, an inextricable heat wave, or the American justice system ruffle his composure just yet.

“Then why is this taking so long?” snapped Ymir, who was sitting on the ground next to her girlfriend, Christa. “Make up your damn mind, Arlert. Eren is right. You just said so yourself, and I'm getting so sick of this goddamned heat that I've got half a mind to take Christa and some cattle and go back to the stupid ranch.” Christa made a noise of approval towards her and nodded.

“Armin, come on,” implored Jean. “Eren and I will go together, just us, no cows. We can run to this town here,” he said, pointing at what appeared to be a miniscule settlement called Trost that sat alone on the map.

“It's deserted all around for miles. No major roads. It'll be the last place the police look. We can lead them away for a few weeks, a month or two maybe, and take some cows back to Franz and Hanna,” mused Mikasa as she fiddled with the ends of scarlet scarf that she always insisted on wearing, come hell or high water.

“They've got to give up eventually,” Sasha reasoned, tilting her head and shrugging her shoulders. “The cops can't catch everyone.”

Armin tapped his toe in in the dirt. A lone cow mooed mournfully, swatting a stray fly with a limp tail.

“Y'all are right,” he finally agreed, exhaling a big huff of air as he shifted his eyes up from the ground to address his team. He drew himself up to his rather unimpressive full height and put on his leader face.

“Ymir, Christa, Sasha, Connie. Take all the cows, go back the to the ranch. Spread rumors that you've seen Jean and Eren heading south. Don't be ostentatious about it; Ymir, I look to you to keep the hyperbole to a minimum,” said Armin, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips at Connie, who reddened like a ripe tomato.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets as Sasha laughed aloud and took his arm.

“All's forgiven. But listen up. I'll go with Mikasa to this divergence in the trail,” he said, his narrow back straight and his voice completely businesslike once again. “Once we arrive, we'll split up and go to these towns, which are nearest to Trost.” He pointed to two tiny lines of ink that spelled out _Stohess_ and _Jinae_.

“If anything happens, whoever gets word first'll ride to Trost to let Jean and Eren know. Which brings me to the final and most crucial point. Jean and Eren are gonna head to Trost and hide. No matter what time you get there, don't go into the town until it's almost nightfall, and do _not_ go anywhere unless either Mikasa or I shows up in town. Understand?”

“Yup,” said Jean indolently, his thin lips popping on the p. He felt like he was about to pass out in this ungodly heat. After letting out a huge yawn, he began drowsily fanning himself with his hat and glanced over at Eren, who repeated the word in just the same way.

“It's settled then.” Armin clapped his hands loudly and rolled up the vellum map, placing it back into his saddlebags with care as he stroked his Appaloosa horse's neck.

Jean took a moment to appreciate their surroundings before they all ran off. True, right now the Cadets were all itchy and sweaty and practically wearing dirt. But summer was on its way and they had a plan. The vitality of the season was thrumming under Jean's skin and flooding into his warm blue veins, clearly visible once he'd rolled up his shirtsleeves to let the mercifully cool breeze touch him.

Jean had always loved the feeling of being outside, of wind rushing through his hair and sliding over the sharp planes of his face; the feeling of his horse, powerful and strong, carrying him to new places. When he had been little, he had always been outside rolling in the mud or some other similar substance equally unfriendly to his clothes. There was something about adventure, about the big open sky that spoke to him, drawing him to the great outdoors like sirens draw sailors.

And yet, when Jean looked over and saw Connie grab Sasha, who was laughing—she was always sure to be either laughing or eating— and give her a swift surprise peck on the mouth, Jean couldn't help but feel like the sky didn't have quite so much to offer anymore.

It wasn't that he was jealous of either Connie or Sasha; they had known they were made for each other almost since they had met. Ymir and Christa were much the same, and Franz and Hanna were already married with a baby on the way back at the ranch.

No, he wasn't pining after any of them. He was just jealous of what they had.

For a long while, he had followed Mikasa around like a puppy waiting for a treat that wasn't ever going to come. Later on, he had embraced his feelings for Eren— and men in general— and he'd thought he had found what he was looking for. But that was a long time ago, when they were too young to know what they wanted, and more importantly what was good for them.

Looking back, Jean knew he and Eren could never have worked. Their personalities clashed together too violently to be in it for the long run, lightning against lightning. Jean needed thunder in his life, strong and low and steady. The problem was there just weren't that many boys in the area that were gay, attractive and willing to screw wanted criminals.

“'What are men to rocks and mountains,'” Jean grumbled, quoting a line from one of Christa's favorite bullshit romance novels and glaring at the sky. Its blueness now seemed like a ludicrous eyesore.

 

Jean walked over to his horse and ran his fingers through her silky mane as he drew himself out of his reverie. He checked his food supplies and his canteen of water as well as his personal flask to make sure he was set for the journey ahead. _More whiskey,_ he decided, nodding to himself without noticing the action as he shook the small metal container. The flask was a gift from his father, and it was nearly empty. Sasha would know what to do.

His horse nickered at him, rolling her dark eyes.

“Apples too, girl. I know.” Jean grinned and walked off to search for Sasha.

 

Alcohol satisfactorily replenished, Jean returned to his horse, holding out a crisp crimson apple in his hand for her to nibble on. Jean needed her spirits and energy high for this trip; it would probably take a few days, what with riding full-tilt and the rest that much exertion would require.

Eren walked his horse over to Jean's, leading it by the bridle. For two creatures so divided by evolution, their temperament was just the same: if you angered Eren, he would punch you in the face. If you angered Eren's horse, he would throw you off in a heartbeat. He expressed his emotions just as well as his rider, even without fists to fling about.

“Ready to rumble?” the shorter man asked, swinging one leg onto his steed's back. Not waiting for an answer, he pulled himself all the way up, shoving his hat back on his dark head to shade his face.

“'Course I am,” Jean replied, hoisting himself onto his horse's broad back. “See you soon, and good luck to you all!” he shouted back to his comrades as he once again spurred on his horse, shooting away alongside Eren, crossing the wide plains beneath the blazing summer sun.

~ ~ ~

Jean and Eren rode almost nonstop for a week, weaving over the Texas landscape, barely sleeping. When they finally arrived in Trost, they were exhausted, grimy, and starving, and their steeds hadn't fared much better. Anyone looking at the two of them wouldn't have been able to distinguish their filthy bodies from the desert surrounding them save for their eyes.

Nothing, however, compared to their disappointment upon actually _reaching_ Trost.

“Are you _shitting_ me?” Jean yelled into the dusky sky. The brilliant red of the setting sun was an absurd contradiction to the vast expanse of brownness that lay before the two men. About a mile ahead of him, Jean could make out the shape of what was undoubtedly Trost: it was isolated and it was small, just as Armin's map had said. The map had failed to mention, however, what small truly meant.

“Twelve buildings tall enough to see. Twelve goddamned tiny dilapidated buildings. Trost can go to _hell_ ,” cursed Eren savagely, kicking the toe of his boot into the cracked earth. “What are we supposed to do while we're here?”

“You heard Armin and them. Hide, dumbass.”

“What a joy. What a goddamned adventure.”

Eren crossed his arms and uttered a few more choice obscenities. Jean glared at the town as if it had personally offended him. He pinched the bridge of his long, thin nose hard, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. _No way,_ Jean gnarled internally. _No way in hell._

Jean sent another killing stare towards the town, the sun's most direct rays turning his irises an angry, fulvous shade. With a final, throaty noise of disgust, he forced himself back onto his horse and made the final leg of the journey towards what would certainly be an infernal few weeks.

 

The travelers arrived in Trost ten minutes later, their spent horses clopping sluggishly down the single street that occupied the center of town. Along this sad little street stood the twelve buildings that Eren's sharp eyes had caught from a mile away, as well as a smattering of derelict shacks that they supposed must be the residents' homes. The town was even more horrendous up close.

Jean raked a painfully dry hand through his greasy hair. At least in this foul state, it would be difficult for the average back-country American to recognize them at first glance. It also helped that they were literally the only people outside.

Most everyone in Trost must have either been asleep or heading that way, because the lights in nearly every storefront were out save for the inn where Jean and Eren would be staying and an establishment that appeared to be a bar. The sagging, rotting wooden boards of the shabby buildings looked like they too were sleeping, sinking down into the earth like people in their beds.

Once Jean and Eren arrived at the inn and were shown to and paid for their rooms, Jean took the best bath of his life. He couldn't remember water ever having felt this good— he scrubbed himself relentlessly until the bathwater was lukewarm and a nasty shade of brown. He hummed tunelessly to himself as he went, relishing in the sight of his own fair skin emerging beneath layers upon layers of caked earth.

Eventually, Jean coaxed himself out of the water and dried himself off with a towel the innkeeper's daughter had provided him with when she lead them to the room. He left his dirty traveling gear on the ground where he had thrown it before jumping into the bath, and tying the towel around his slim waist, meandered back into the bedroom, where he dressed in the nicest clothes he'd brought with him. After inspecting his attire in the mirror, he pulled out his straight razor and shaved off a week's worth of scraggly stubble.

 _Time to meet the neighbors_ , Jean thought as he called a quick goodbye to Eren, who was now washing up in the bathroom.

As he passed through the common room of the inn, he didn't garner a second glance from anyone. For now, at least, they were safe.

 

Once outside the inn, Jean began making his way towards the little bar he had seen on the way in. Surprisingly, it was still open, protesting obstinately against the lateness of the night and the deadness of the town. Up close, Jean noticed that the bar was just about the only thing in Trost not slowly decaying away beneath a coating of grime and dust: the walls were painted a cheerful yellow and the windows were suffused with a light of the same color. Above the entrance, there hung a sign that read _Bodt's_ in wide, tidy burgundy lettering. Jean took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Inside the bar, he was in for a surprise. While Trost's one street had been totally deserted, Bodt's was packed—or as packed as packed could be a in a town this small. The cramped bar was filled with patrons, both men and women exchanging body heat in the close, low-ceilinged space. A group of four middle-aged men sat a corner table, playing a game of poker. More than one tipsy girl was seated on some sleazy man's lap, giggling loudly and smiling much too broad. Still others sat alone at the bar, quite a few of which made eyes at Jean as he crossed the floor from the door to the counter to ask for a drink. It seemed like everyone in Trost had come out tonight to greet him.

Jean took the last remaining stool at the bar, swinging himself up onto the high seat and planting his elbows heavily on the counter. He deserved a drink or three after riding at full speed for seven days without even stopping for a shower.

“Hi there.”

Jean's head whipped around at the unexpected noise. His amber eyes met a pair of drooping green ones.

“I'm Hitch,” the girl said, introducing herself. She took Jean's hand in her small, soft one and shook it, flashing him a dazzling smile at the same time. “We met earlier at the inn; I'm the owners' daughter.”

“Oh!” Jean cried out as she leaned closer to him. He had no memory of ever having seen her before. “Um. Of course.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but was cut off by the bartender, who chose that moment to ask what Jean wanted to drink.

“Sir, what can I get you?”

“Just a beer, please,” Jean replied. Hitch scowled.

“ _So_ ,” she purred, recollecting her former coyness as she placed a delicate hand on Jean's thigh. “How long are you in town for? Now that you're all cleaned up, I feel like we could come to be _very_ good friends.”

Jean swallowed uncomfortably. His throat felt very thick. Perhaps meeting the neighbors hadn't been the best idea after all.

Salvation came once more in the form of the bartender, who rushed back from the beer tap on the far side of the counter, carrying Jean's much-needed drink in a short, thick glass. He set it down with a loud clink; Jean saw his nervous brown hands do so in the edges of his vision.

Jean twisted away from his overly-forward bar mate, hoping to use the excuse of thanking the bartender as an escape from Hitch.

“Thank you, Sir—” Jean began quickly. He stopped just as quickly, the hand he had reached out to take his glass with frozen on the counter. He knew he was staring, but he didn't care. He didn't know he was blushing, but if he had, he wouldn't have cared about that, either.

He was completely transfixed by the _freckles._

They were scattered densely across the bartender's face like stars on a clear night in the countryside, and they folded into the man's dimples when he smiled amiably at Jean.

“You're welcome.” 

“I'm Jean,” Jean blurted out suddenly. 

“M-Marco,” the bartender responded, holding eye contact with Jean a just little bit longer than was necessary before turning to help another customer. 

Hitch gaped at Jean, huffed indignantly, and turned away to chat up the patron sitting on her other side, who looked to be enjoying her company much more than Jean had. 

~ ~ ~ 

An hour later, Bodt's was deserted. The patrons had trickled out quickly once the clock struck ten, taking their bawdy laughter and lurching motions with them. Rowdy though they were, their country constitutions apparently could not sustain the all-night party spirit of carefree city dwellers, even though the bar was technically open until eleven.

Outside, it had started to rain, a blessed change from the infernal heat that had been cooking Texas for the past three weeks. The bartender wiped the counter tiredly, skirting a path around his last straggling customer. 

Jean still sat at the bar, sipping slowly on his third beer. When Marco turned away, he seized the chance to discreetly check out his ass. 

Letting out a short, sharp sigh, Marco shoved the rag he'd been using to clean back into the pocket of his half-apron. “So,” he asked hesitantly, eyeing Jean from the side, “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“Nothing yet, thanks,” Jean said. “If you need any help cleaning up, please tell me.”

“You know what? Would you mind putting those chairs up for me?” Marco replied, pointing with one hand and crossing his fingers on the other that Jean was actually as nearly-sober as he looked. Asking for a favor was a way to make friends, right?

“Certainly.” 

Jean slid off of his stool and headed for the corner that Marco had indicated, thanking his lucky stars for his high tolerance. If Armin were in his place, he would have been falling over drunk after about one and a half. 

 

After he hoisted up the chairs, Jean returned to his beer and tried desperately to think of some way to make conversation. He'd eaten dinner earlier, back when the bar was full. Now he didn't really have much of an excuse to stay—the drink in his glass was dwindling low, it was late, and there was a growing awkward silence in the room that had to be fixed immediately or Jean might spontaneously combust.

Jean ran one finger around the rim of his glass as he sat taking in all the small details of the bar. Its inside was as orderly as its outside once all the unruly customers had left; the walls were paneled in dark, lacquered wood that matched the frames of the windows, each tap was clearly and colorfully labeled, and various glasses were arranged in even rows in the cabinets along the wall behind the bar according to size and shape. 

“You must really work hard to take care of this place,” Jean noted as he looked around.

“I do.”

“What makes you want to run a bar here?”

Behind the counter, Marco placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head, thinking on how to answer. “Sit with me,” was all he said, gesturing vaguely towards one of the tables Jean had put the chairs up on top of. He walked over to the table and took down two chairs and plopped down in one, waving Jean towards the other. 

Marco continued their conversation without missing a beat. “To tell you the truth, I grew up here, and this place was my dad's, and now it's mine, and I guess that's just how things are. I worked with him, learning the business, you know. I started when I was sixteen, and I'm twenty now.”

“Do you like what you do?” Jean probed. He was dying to know more about sorrel-skinned, freckly, frankly gorgeous Marco, and he was not above dropping fifty dollars on drinks to do just that. 

“Actually— I really love it. I like making people feel better and helping them let loose and have a good time. Speaking of which, d'you want another drink? It's on me,” Marco said, already getting up from his chair.  
“Sure.” Jean smiled genuinely. Cheap is good, but free is better.

Marco came back from the bar carrying two taller glasses of amber liquid. 

“It's been so long since I got to sit and have a drink with someone,” Marco sighed, taking a long swig from his glass. “I hope you don't mind—“ he said suddenly, apprehensively, looking up at Jean with worried eyes. From this close proximity, Jean noticed that they were the exact color of coffee with cream. He also noticed that his hair, parted down the middle and buzzed into an undercut, was the exact color of coffee without it.

“Why would I mind? If anyone should mind, it's you; your name's the one on the bar—”  _is it?_ Jean thought, embarrassed with himself. _I never actually asked what his last name was._

“'Spose so,” Marco said introspectively. “By the way— I never asked your surname. I mean, mine's Bodt, I thought you'd probably figure that out— but who are you?”

“Jean Kirschstein.” Jean extended his right hand out to Marco, who took it and shook it firmly. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Jean said before taking a long pull on his drink.

For a moment both were silent as they tipped their glasses back, chugging their booze contentedly. Marco coughed a bit when he set his tumbler down on the table as the liquor sent flames up his throat.

“So, Mr. Kirschstein, what is it that you do?”

“Cattle driver,” he replied, just a little too fast. He and everyone else in the Cadets used that same excuse for anyone who asked.

“All about life on the road, huh?”

“Pretty much,” Jean said. The more he drank, the more he could feel his country accent coming out, twanging on the vowels. His father had made him work to cover it until it was barely there anymore, and it only ever made an appearance when Jean got drunk.

“Interesting,” Marco said, nodding in understanding. He stood, grabbing each of their glasses and carrying them back to the tap, where he filled them up with aromatic golden whiskey.

 _Oh good lord,_ Jean thought as he saw what Marco was bringing him. _Here we go._

He tried to shake his head, but Marco insisted, bringing the drinks back to their table without running into too many sharp corners.

“Marco Bodt, are you tryin' to get me completely trashed?” Jean slurred, laughing a little.

“No, me? _Never,_ ” Marco slurred right back, laughing even louder.

 

The two men continued drinking for another few hours, trying out interesting mixes from Marco's taps, laughing and talking and generally feeling like flying—as did their stomachs.  Sometime after one in the morning the rain really started to pick up, transforming from a pleasant drizzle into an airborne tidal wave. Dark clouds rolled in and covered the stars above Bodt's, where Jean and Marco were passed out with their heads on their hands, leaning over their table.  Suddenly a clap of thunder shook Trost's atmosphere, booming down the solitary street and right into one dozing Marco Bodt's ear.

“What in god's name—” he started, sitting bolt upright and looking around wildly.

It took him a moment to calm down, but once he did, the first thing he noticed was the fact that Jean had snored right on through the noise.

Marco smiled tiredly. His head felt like it was a spinning top, but it was a good feeling.

“Jean,” he whispered hoarsely as he tried to shake the other man awake. “Jean.” He shoved him a little more roughly this time. “Jean!”

“Huh? Wha—?” Jean's bleary hazel eyes leveled on Marco. “You shithead,” he said, punching him lightly on one shoulder.

“Jean, we've been asleep on this table for two hours. It's rainin' and it's dark and nasty outside. You don't wanna go out in that just to go to the shitty little inn. Stay with me tonight. I live upstairs, and I've got an extra mattress.”

Jean shot Marco a lopsided smile. “Lead the way, partner.”

 


	3. Mr. Sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marco knows how to make eggs the right way.

Little slivers of sunlight glanced through the slatted shutters on the windows of Marco Bodt's apartment, illuminating the cozy bedroom where Jean Kirschstein still slumbered, his light brown hair a mess on the feather down pillow he'd buried his face in. A small puddle of drool was trickling from his open mouth and collecting on the pillow as he dreamed, dead to the world.

Jean's breath hitched as he rolled over onto his back. Every time he snored, swirling dust particles were sucked into his open mouth and exhaled back out again, catching the light and turning the air gold. The obnoxiously nasal sounds were the only disturbance of the dark, quiet stillness of the morning.

On the other side of the apartment, Marco Bodt was already awake, tiptoeing around in sock feet as he tried not to wake his guest. Judging by the sounds coming from Jean's mattress on the floor, however, he wouldn't be opening his eyes anytime soon.

 

Jean stirred restlessly in his sleep, breaking off mid-snore and muttering something that probably made sense in the context of his dream. A hand clutched the sheets and was then flung into the air wildly and without control, coming to rest back beside his head.

 

Marco looked at the grandfather clock stationed on the far side of his bedroom. The ornately stenciled wooden hands rested on 7:32. Breakfast time.

All at once the darkness was shooed away and light enveloped the room as Marco threw the shutters open, washing everything in soft morning sunshine.

Marco hummed a cheerful tune to himself as he pulled out cooking supplies, glancing over at his housemate as he did so. He had to stifle a laugh when he saw Jean raise his hand again, this time slapping himself in the face when he put it back down.

 

Jean rolled over again, making irritable sleep noises down in his throat as he snuggled deeper into the thick wool blanket he was tangled in. His bed was immensely comfortable, softer than anything he'd had the pleasure of resting in for weeks, and he was not about to let sleep get away from him.

_There was a woman, but her features seemed oddly distorted; she was sitting in a little wooden chair by a mirror, her eyes were too large in her revolted face and she—_

_Wait._

_Sunlight?_

Jean sat straight up then, looking frantically at the walls of the unfamiliar room around him. He had no idea where he was; his eyes were still blurred from sleep and his chest was heaving; one short moment ago he'd been with his mother, and now... here?

Where was here?

He turned his head sharply towards the window, where the sudden shock of morning light speared back through his pupils, stinging his eyes and forcing him to close them against the intrusive brightness. He squinted them open again slowly, placing his right hand on his forehead to act as a visor.

After giving his eyes a moment to adjust, Jean surveyed the room he had found himself in. Through his narrowed and blurred field of vision, he made out the shape of a wooden chest of drawers, a tall, sturdy-looking four poster bed, and an outdated cast iron stove that sat chugging away, pumping smoke up its pipe and spewing it out into the clear blue sky above Bodt's.

Marco stood in front of the stove, swishing what was to become cheesy eggs around in a pan.

“Good morning.” He shot a good-natured smile over his shoulder towards Jean.

“Uh... good morning to you, too?” He phrased it as a question without meaning to. He still wasn't totally sure where he was. Jean had never been a morning person by anyone's definition.

Jean splayed a hand on his chest as he calmed down. As he really began to wake up, the fine details and colors of his dream began to drain away, replaced by memories and reality. There was the escape to Trost, the bar, the very, very attractive man...

 _Oh shit_ , Jean thought. _Oh_ shit.

“Marco.”

“Yes?”

Jean looked down sheepishly at his hands like a schoolboy. He could feel his face heating up; he was sure his ears were crimsoned with blood and shame at this point, but he had to ask.

“Did we... um... get up to any... improper... activities... last night?” He felt as if he were being force-fed cotton balls, slowly suffocating as they filled his throat.

Marco nearly dropped the skillet. “No! Ah. No. Nothing of that sort... happened...” he let his words trail off, too embarrassed to continue. Unable to think of something to say, he chuckled shakily and turned back to the stove to push the eggs around a bit with a metal spatula. The tips of his ears were hotter than the stove he was cooking on.

 _Didn't immediately say he wasn't into men,_ Jean thought, mentally patting himself on the back. _Ten points to Jean Kirschstein._

A minute later Marco regained his composure. “We just kind of came upstairs, and took our boots off, and I got you the mattress, and we slept. That's it.”

“Oh.” Jean rubbed a hand along the back of his neck as he tried to force the blush from his cheeks by sheer force of will. “Okay.”

It made Jean feel a lot better to know that he hadn't slept with the first pretty boy he'd seen the first few hours he'd been in town. Maybe all Sasha and Connie's jokes were wrong; perhaps he wasn't a complete and total tramp. If he had to be here for a month, he wanted to stay on good terms with as many of the locals as possible, which meant trying not to screw everything that moved—or possibly just this one particular thing. And to be honest, he'd really enjoyed his time with Marco at the bar. Maybe they could be friends.

Although, when Marco bent over to grab what appeared to be a pepper shaker from a bottom kitchen drawer, Jean felt his mouth go rather dry.

“So,” Marco began again, “I started breakfast.”

“You're a morning person, huh?”

“Always have been. Probably always will be. Somebody's gotta cook while lazybones here gets their sleep.” He shot an extremely self-satisfied grin in Jean's general direction as he turned off the stove.

Jean's eyes wandered lethargically over to the grandfather clock. “It's 7:40.”

“And?”

“Does the concept of a good night's rest mean anything to you?”

“'Spose not by your standards,” Marco said, sliding the now finished eggs onto two chipped, robin's egg blue china plates. He pulled down two glasses from another cabinet above his head and filled them up with milk from a jug in his icebox after grabbing two tarnished silver forks from a drawer. In an elaborate balancing act, Marco managed to carry everything to his small, round kitchen table, where he sat down and waited expectantly for Jean to get his ass out of bed.

All he heard was a low, sleepy sigh.

“Jean, get up,” Marco groaned, lightly banging one fist on the table top. “Look at this delicious food I have deigned to cook for you. Come eat it before it gets cold, Kirschstein.”

“Mmmphft,” Jean groaned, smushing his face back into his lovely, soft, cool pillow, _oh how nice—_

“Might I remind you that you're a guest in my house and I can kick you out if you don't act right?”

“ _Fine._ ”

Jean let out a grunting sigh as he heaved himself up from the mattress, his feet catching in the blankets that he had wrapped around himself like a cocoon. He staggered to the table and shot Marco the dirtiest look he could muster this early in the morning, rolling his eyes like a teenager.

It wasn't very threatening, but he tried.

Jean stabbed a little lump of cheesy egg with his fork. He then placed it tentatively on his tongue and began to chew experimentally.

“Not bad,” Jean said, nodding to his fork in gratitude. “Interesting spin on the eggs.” Marco's cooking was actually decent—nothing compared to Sasha's, of course, but still. It was a pleasant surprise. Jean's semi-wild night had left him tired and hungry and he wanted to wolf down the rest then and there, but he was in polite company and therefore had to be polite himself.

“Interesting is what people say when they don't like something and don't wanna be rude, Jean.”

“I mean that in the most sincere of ways. The cheese is a spec-tac-u-lar—” he took care to sound out each syllable— “touch.” He shot Marco a shit-eating grin as he picked up his milk, toasting the air like a king at a banquet.

“Eat your damn eggs, Jean Kirschstein.” Marco lowered his eyelids and pursed his full lips in a glare. Jean shrugged and took that as his cue to tuck in.

“So what do you do all day in a town this small?” Jean asked, maneuvering his tongue around a mouthful of egg.

“I read, mostly. Take care of the bar. Nothing special, I guess.” Marco frowned almost imperceptibly as he shrugged his shoulders.

“Doesn't it get boring?” Jean immediately felt bad for asking. He had no idea what the other man liked; perhaps sitting around doing nothing all day in the middle of nowhere was his favorite thing in the world. He turned his gaze to the walls of the apartment, to his plate in front of him, to anything but Marco. His mother had given him his fair share of spankings and cuffs around the head for rudeness as a child.

 

Come to think of it, her birthday was coming up in July. The big forty. Once he escaped Trost, maybe Jean would buy her something nice and send it in the post, some fancy jewelery or a new bonnet, decked with lace and ribbons galore. It wasn't as if he could go home; he knew she didn't want to see him.

After the war, it had been just Jean and Eudora Kirschstein against the world, dealing with their troubles in their own separate ways. Eudora had become quieter, more reluctant to go out into society and participate in those asinine charity balls, to work for her living, to do anything, really, except worship her god and care for her son. Jean was much the same, except he used the outdoors as his escape, rolling in the dirt and making mud pies, anything to get out of that old creepy house his daddy was never coming home to.

Fortunately for the shell of the Kirschstein family, Jean's father had come from a family of adequate means and had left something of a small inheritance for them. Unfortunately, money does not last forever, and soon Eudora remarried, chaining herself to the first rich man in sight to secure her son's future. She began to reenter society on her husband's arm, taking pride in all the glitzy joys of life among the gossips and the snobs, dancing and shopping and enjoying the thrill ride of life. She deserved to have it good after the hell she'd been through, waiting for Mr. Kirschstein to walk through her front door when she knew in her heart he wouldn't.

In hindsight, Jean knew he and his mother had been extremely lucky to fall in with Mr. Pixis. He was a nice man, charming and benign, if a little eccentric; he had been good to them when others would not have, indulging Eudora's every desire. Truthfully, the blame could not be pinned on his stepfather, as Jean had tried to tell himself for quite some time. He might have been an enabler, but the poisoned fruit was his mother.

 

When he was nearly eleven, she had caught him holding hands with a neighborhood boy named Samuel on the walk home from school.

After that, she watched him for weeks, prowling in the background like a panther waiting to pounce on any indiscretion, when finally, on the last day of the sixth grade, she looked on from her window in absolute horror as Jean planted a kiss on the other boy's cheek.

Arriving home that day was like falling down the rabbit hole and finding Hell at the bottom in place of Wonderland.

 

“What in our dear Lord's name did you just say, Jean Nathaniel Kirschstein?”

“I said Ma, I think I may like boys.”

Jean remembered her rushing over to him and clapping a hand over his mouth as if someone in the house might hear; Mr. Pixis was still at work, and the maid had gone home for the day. Who was there to listen?

“You can't ever say that again, Jean, baby, you hear me?”

“But Ma, why? Sam's nice enough, you said so yourself when he came over to—“

“Enough!” she screeched, drawing back from her son like he was the devil himself, ochre eyes that matched Jean's widening in fear. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her hand searching her vanity counter top for her delicate lace fan, fingers jerking spasmodically as she tried desperately to find it and calm herself. After a few tense moments she found the thing and began whipping it in front of her face as the tears came, fast and hot, carving ugly stripes into her carefully applied makeup. The bodice of her chintz gown strained against its seams as she struggled for breath; it seemed as though she was having an attack of some sort as she threw herself down into the chair in front of her mirror, hunched over and weeping wretchedly.

Suddenly she sat up straight, as if a rod had been nailed to her back. Her eyes were uncomfortably wide, staring directly at Jean and somehow managing to penetrate beyond him, through him, as if he were not even there.

“Jean, honey. Listen to me. You don't need to say things like that. What about that girl from school, hm, darlin'? What about her?”

“Mama,” Jean pleaded, pulling out a word he hadn't used since he was eight, “Mama, I like Sam. She's just a friend.”

Eudora blinked once, very slowly, before absolutely losing it.

Jean heard an intake of breath, a low keening noise like a dog that had been kicked, and suddenly, a _scream—_

“Oh, dearest God!” His mother shoved her face into her hands, dropping the fan onto the hardwood floor of her bedroom and wailing like a banshee. “What have I done to deserve this hell! I was a _damned_ good wife—”

—Jean gasped when he heard her swear—

“—and I had the perfect husband, and a beautiful home, and a wonderful child; dearest God, why do you seek to destroy my life? What have I done that this is your will? How can you do this to an _honest woman!_ ”

She dug her hands into her elegantly curled hair and began pulling out the pins holding it in place, flinging them viciously to the ground as she howled wordlessly.

Jean knelt on the floor and stuck out a timid hand, trying to reach her back to pat it, maybe stroke her hair, give her a hug, do something, anything, _anything_ to make it stop. He hadn't seen his mother fall apart so terrifyingly, so completely, since they had received the telegraph notifying them of his father's status as MISSING IN ACTION.

He hadn't realized that when she broke, she had never been put back together.

Eudora's breath hitched as she looked up at him abruptly, light brown eyes reddened and puffy with tears. She slid out of her chair and onto the floor, skirts folding around her in stiff, starched peaks as she brought herself to Jean's eye level and took his small face in her shaking hands. She smiled with far too many teeth, and when she spoke, her voice was flat and toneless, deadly calm in the face of her twisted day of reckoning.

“Get out of my house. You are an abomination in the eyes of our God, and I do not want to see you again.”

 

Jean hadn't seen her since.

He sent packages home when he could, pretty little things, like her fan. She had always loved the pretty little things, the things that stood out in the most lovely ways when you looked at the world through rose-colored glasses.

He had tried sending a few letters to her before he'd taken off with his crew, but he never received one reply. Perhaps she hadn't even opened them; he had no way of knowing now that he no longer had a permanent address he could advertise for the purpose of return-to-sender.

Honestly, Jean tried not to think about her much. It was easier to block it all out, and besides, he had a new family now.

For years, he had pushed down his attraction towards men in the hopes that one day he could return home with his beautiful wife on one arm, perhaps Mikasa or one of the other girls, and say _hey, Mama. I'm sorry. You were right._

But she wasn't.

Jean used to dream about her all the time, nearly every night, especially after the Cadets had just gotten started. This was the first time it had happened in years, thankfully. When he was younger, there had been times when he'd woken everyone up screaming or crying and they'd had to hold him down until he woke up, begging her to let him stay, he'd stop liking Sam, it's alright, he could see if that girl from school wanted to come to his house sometime, it'd all be okay, it's all gonna be okay—

 

“Jean. Hey. Jean.” Marco waved one freckled hand in front of Jean's expressionless face. “Come back to me here.”

“I'm sorry, what?” Jean said, blinking quickly and shaking his head. He must have zoned out for a minute; his right hand was hanging still in the air. A small yellow bit of egg was speared on one of the tines of his fork, halfway to his mouth.

Amazing that though it took him years to get over the pain of the wounds his mother had inflicted on him, it took only a few seconds to remember everything about their conception.

He felt his face flush with embarrassment as he realized how discourteous he'd just been, zoning out at the breakfast table of such a kindly host in the middle of a conversation. _Ma would've died for shame,_ Jean thought as he wrung his hands in his lap.

“I said, if you want, come by the bar again tonight. It does get boring all by myself and I wouldn't mind some company besides my books and my customers. You can bring your friend if you'd like.”

“ _Hell,_ ” Jean groaned emphatically, slapping his forehead with his free hand.

Marco's face fell. Was it something he said?

Jean answered the unvoiced question for him. “I am the world's worst friend. I forgot all about Eren and he hasn't got any idea why I didn't go to the inn last night. He's probably gonna throw something at me as soon as I walk through the door.”

“Do you need to go?” Marco asked, his voice lilting up at the end as if he hoped very, very much that he did not.

“I think I do, and I'm so sorry to run like this— you know what? Let me make it up to you. I'll go back to the inn for now and sit with Eren, and then later on tonight we can come by and see you. That way you won't have to do without my dazzling personality for more than twenty four hours, which would likely prove fatal.”

“Sold,” Marco replied, laughing a little and slapping a hand on the table like an auctioneer with his gavel.

“Really though. Thank you so much, for everything.” Jean hopped up from his chair and pushed it under the table. After squatting down a little to be nearer to seated Marco's height, he clapped a hand on the other man's shoulder and looked directly into those coffee-colored eyes, ducking his head in the slightest of nods. “I mean it.”

After hurriedly smoothing down his clothes—he finally realized, with a twinge of chagrin, that he had slept in his fancy outfit from last night— he dropped his plate in the kitchen basin with a clatter, pulled on his boots, and headed out of Marco's apartment.

“I'll see you later!” Jean called as he headed down the stairs, feet drumming on the steps as he bolted out the bar's front door, leaving it to swing closed on its own.

Eren was going to _kill_ him.

~ ~ ~

Jean walked through the door of his rented room in the inn and was immediately smacked in the face by some projectile.

His face fell in annoyance as he leaned down to pick up the offending object: a fat white pillow. “Eren.”

“How was your night out?” came the reply, dripping with sarcasm. “Did you screw half the town so that they'd leave us alone?”

Eren Jaeger stood tensely in the middle of the bedroom, armed with another pillow and ready to strike. Jean thanked every deity that was listening that they weren't back at the ranch where things belonged to them. If they had been, the pillow would have likely been a plate instead.

“Actually, I didn't. Satisfied?”

“You're such a goddamned liar. Why didn't you come home until—” Eren shot a quick glance to the wall clock that hung over the room's fireplace, “—8:05 in the morning?”

“I got drunk and I had a fun little sleepover with my new best friend. We braided each other's hair and told ghost stories.” Jean smirked, a disdainful, irritated expression that didn't touch his eyes. “You're invited to our next luncheon.”

“So you screwed him, then. Who was it?”

“The bartender at Bodt's, Eren. And no, I legitimately _did not_ sleep with him. Didn't even kiss him.”

Eren noticed the slight change in the timbre of Jean's voice when he said _kiss._ “You wanted to, though.”

“Maybe I do. Is that a problem?”

“No. Just next time you decide to stay out all night, tell me. Remember the phrase 'on the run?' It's kind of important that we keep tabs on each other in case, oh I don't know, the cops show up?” Eren was seething. He'd always had trouble controlling his temper, and it came out in the most violent of manners when he was angry with Jean.

For a moment both men stood at an impasse, two generals on opposing sides of the Battle of Feather Down.

Finally Eren let out a sigh, letting his stiff shoulders drop quickly and letting go of the pillow, which plopped onto the hardwood floor with a _foopf._ “I was a little worried, okay? Shit could be going down at any moment and we've gotta look out for each other.”

“I know that,” Jean shot back, the fiery indignation fading from his voice as he took a step forward into the room. “I'm sorry. And I'm serious about the invitation to the bar. Marco— Mr. Bodt asked if I'd swing by tonight, and he said I could bring you if you wanted to come...”

Eren frowned and then smiled devilishly, raising dark eyebrows high over bright green eyes. “You want into this guy's pants so bad.”

“Hush, idiot,” Jean said before spinning on his heel and escaping to the common room of the inn. The second pillow sailed over his head, barely missing him as he rushed downstairs to ask the innkeepers to draw him another bath.

~ ~ ~

Jean spent the remainder of the morning with Eren holed up in their hotel room, poring over maps and discussing strategy in hushed voices. Eventually, he started to feel cabin fever creeping up on him and dragged Eren out of the inn to go survey the town, both for his own personal interest and for useful resources they might have to “borrow” if they had to run off.

The trick to buying yourself time in an iffy situation is having people that you've taught to trust you vouch for you, even as you're robbing them blind right under their noses. Jean might not have been a genius, but there were two things he excelled at: horseback riding and bullshitting, a talent on which he prided himself immensely. No one was safe from his charms, especially not innocent, unassuming country folk like the people of Trost. The more locals they spoke to, the clearer it became that Armin had found them the perfect place to ride out their storm.

Somehow, however, the universe had decided to align itself to leave Jean with the one person in the world that would be most detrimental to his plans to charm the pants off this godforsaken town: one Eren Jaeger, graceless con extraordinaire.

The problem with Eren was that he lacked any and all faculties that enabled diplomacy or secrecy, especially when he was stressed or angry— or worse, both. Another problem was that he was in at least one of these moods a good fifty percent of the time; with Eren, your secrets were a coin's flip away from being spilled. There was no telling what he'd let slip or who he'd get into a fight with, so the Cadets eventually learned to just have him stay silent when they used their coverups in public. Usually Armin kept him in check, and now that Jean was alone with Eren, he found himself missing the tiny blond man an inordinate amount.

On this day, however, fortune seemed to smile upon the two fugitives, and they spoke to almost every official or business owner in Trost without arousing too much suspicion. Jean had had to step on Eren's foot a few times, but it worked.

A little later that evening, the two men made their way to Bodt's to celebrate their successful casing of Trost with rounds of drinks. The sun was creeping nearer to the horizon, casting lengthy shadows down the town's one street as Eren and Jean walked to the bar.

 

“You came!” Marco said, smiling happily at Jean when he heard him knock on Bodt's front door and then the squeak of the rusty old hinges as he let himself into the bar. Bodt's wasn't very busy yet; the swarming droves of loud, lewd customers from the previous evening had not yet appeared. Apart from Marco and Jean and Eren, there was only one other person in the bar: a short man, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, who sat idly on the far side of the counter, taking long, slow drags on his cigarette and puffing small smoke rings into the air. Every now and then he'd remove the cigarette from his lips and hold it between two fingers as he sipped his scotch. He said nothing to acknowledge Marco or his visitors, almost as if he didn't even notice them. From this angle, neither Eren nor Jean could see his face.

Marco came out from behind the bar counter, pushing up the sleeves of his cotton shirt and wiping his hands on a rag tucked into his apron as he came to greet Jean-and-guest.

Marco stuck out a friendly hand to Eren. “Marco Bodt,” he said cheerily, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly way. “I own the bar.”

“Eren Jaeger,” the other replied as he took Marco's hand and shook it. “Jean's partner in crime. Nice to meet you.”

Marco turned back towards the bar and began walking, beckoning for Jean and Eren to follow him to the stools and take a seat. While Marco's back was turned, Jean shot Eren the most reproachful look he was able. _“Not funny_ ,” he whispered angrily out of the corner of his thin mouth, eyebrows drawing sharply together. Eren turned up his ski slope nose but said nothing in retaliation.

Once Jean took his seat, he tried to his best to make a blank slate of his expression and think of something to talk about. Having Eren with him when he could be talking to Marco alone felt strange, like an unexpected cold snap in the air when it should be springtime.

“So—“ Jean began, but was abruptly cut off by the loud bang of a door thrown open.

In strode the sheriff of Trost, a tall, burly blond man with a countenance that somehow managed to look surly one hundred percent of the time. When he spoke, however, he had one of the most welcoming voices Jean had heard all day.

“Hey, Marco!” the man called loudly as he walked toward the bar. His manner of moving seemed very confident and steady, especially for so solid a man. The way he carried himself advertised his position better than the gleaming six pointed star pinned to his chest.

“Hey there, Sheriff Braun,” Marco answered, already reaching for an empty beer tankard from one of his cabinets. “The usual?”

“The usual. And I've told you before, call me Reiner.”

Marco rolled his eyes and chuckled as he filled the glass with foaming amber ale. “Sure, Sir.”

The man on the far side of the bar finished off his first cigarette and immediately pulled out another, lighting it with a click from a small silver lighter he kept in the pocket of his thin black jacket.

As Jean and Eren drew Marco into conversation, Sheriff Braun's head turned at the sound. “Sir,” he called politely down the bar, “you can't smoke in this establishment.” He got up and walked over to where the lone man was sitting, puffing away incessantly. “If you really want to smoke, you can go outside.”

The short man turned and gave the sheriff a look so imbued with venom it could kill a horse.

In a flat, emotionless voice, he responded, “Nobody told me I couldn't smoke in here.” He barely moved when he spoke; he didn't blink, his muscles didn't twitch, his mouth hardly changed shape to form the words. In fact, he almost looked bored as he turned back to the bar and his drink.

“Sir,” the sheriff continued in a low voice, “please bear with me. In our town we don't condone smoking indoors. I'm sure you'll be fine if you finish that cigarette outside.”

Suddenly the man's steel blue eyes, formerly so empty of any feeling, flashed for just a moment. He looked back at the sheriff. “I said, nobody told me, and he didn't do anything about it.” He inclined his head towards an oblivious Marco. “How was I supposed to know?” He gave a small shrug, an almost noncommittal gesture, and turned away again.

Reiner Braun was started to get a tad peeved. He hated dealing with people who wouldn't listen when they heard the law laid down. “ _Sir,_ I realize that you must be new in town and don't know our rules. But if you continue to persist in smoking I must oblige you to go outdoors.”

Like the crack of a whip the shorter man wheeled on him, turning so fast it was a tad unsettling when combined with those empty gray eyes. “And I have told _you,_ sir, that I came in and was not notified of the situation. Why aren't you punishing _him?_ ” He jerked a thumb in Marco's direction.

“Sir!” Reiner said, raising his voice just enough to let the man know he meant business. His formerly easy, friendly posture stiffened as he drew himself up to his full height and crossed his thick, muscular arms over an equally thick and muscular chest.  “Please leave. _Now.”_

Jean jumped when he heard the sheriff's irritated voice boom through the bar. “Is there a problem, sir?” he asked warily, shooting a nervous glance Marco's way. Marco shrugged. He had never been much of one to get involved in conflict, and he wasn't about to start now. Reiner could sort things out...probably.

 _“No,”_ the man retorted, lengthening the word on his tonuge. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly as he eyed Sheriff Braun.

Jean looked back and forth between the two men locked in their argument. His face broke into a wide grin. Of all the places to find this guy, it had to be Trost.

He quietly excused himself from Marco and Eren and quickly made his way to the scene of the confrontation on the opposite side of the bar. He shot a look to the sheriff that seemed to say, _let me handle this_.

Reiner didn't put up a fight.  If this guy really wanted to get himself killed by an impertinent, chain-smoking maniac, he'd let him.

“Levi Fortier,” Jean said as he made eye contact with the man. He cracked a smile and stuck out a tan, scarred-knuckled hand. “Long time no see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two punch system: hit em with fluff, angst, fluff, angst, until ya got a knockout. :)  
> I apologize for any emotional damage incurred in this chapter
> 
> guess who stayed up until one thirty and has to get up at five thirty again  
> definitely not me what


	4. A Tangible Smoker and Metaphorical Mirrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> backstories are what i live for

Levi Fortier cocked his head slightly as he pushed himself up off his bar stool, the bangs of his undercut black hair swinging into his face. His deadpan expression remained unaltered as his eyes made a quick sweep of Jean, taking in all the small details, trying to see what he'd been up to. He was the sort of person who missed nothing.

“What is he doing?” Marco whispered confusedly under his breath to Eren, who sipped his whiskey but didn't answer him. He was too focused on watching the exchange between his comrade and Levi, sea green eyes darting back and forth from one man to the other, alight with interest.

On the other side of the counter, Jean began to feel a little uncomfortable with his hand hanging out in the air. He knew Levi was trustworthy, but that didn't mean he was tactful.

Marco looked from one face to another, brown eyes darting quickly around the room. The atmosphere of the bar was charged with tension so thick you'd have needed a battle axe to cut it.

No one was saying anything, and the empty silence began to stretch on as Levi studied Jean with sharp, narrowed eyes.

After a few tense, silent moments, Levi finally grasped Jean's proffered hand and shook it. “Great,” he said in a monotone voice. The left corner of his thin, downturned mouth lifted an infinitesimal amount as he looked Jean up and down. “Just who I was hoping to see.”

Jean let out a nearly inaudible sigh of relief and put on the kind of smile reserved for coworkers at workplace Christmas parties. “So, how's the wife? Kids?”

“Hange's great,” Levi responded, smiling unsarcastically for what was perhaps the fourth or fifth time in his entire life. “She's got another one on the way. I hope it's a girl so Catherine has someone to play with, you know? Henry's gotten too big to roughhouse with her anymore.”

Sheriff Reiner's square jaw dropped incredulously. “You know this asshole?” he asked Jean agitatedly, jerking his blond head in Levi's direction.

“Oh! Um. Yes.”

Reiner's scowl deepened. _“How.”_

“He's, uh, my uncle,” Jean replied awkwardly, forcing himself to maintain eye contact. Jean knew from experience that he could hold his own in a fight, but Reiner was several inches taller and substantially more muscular than him, and the way he was staring Jean down made him a little nervous. He didn't want to piss the sheriff off by saying the wrong thing. “We're... um, very close.” He nodded once, very stiffly, as though he were an automaton.

“Unbelievable, the shit that happens in this town. It's supposed to be _small_ and _quiet,”_ Reiner muttered to himself, shaking his head and looking up at the ceiling in irritation. He grabbed his drink from the counter and marched away to a corner table in the bar, where he plunked his thick frame down heavily and nursed his beer. The sheriff wasn't a prideful person, but being undermined by such a little man— especially one that was older than he was— was kind of humiliating.

“Eren.” Levi made a beckoning gesture with his left hand. “Come here.”

Not waiting to see if Eren followed, Levi led Jean by the wrist from the bar without giving Reiner so much as a second glance. Jean had no choice but to come with him; for so recalcitrant a person, Levi was improbably tiny, even shorter than Armin, but his slight stature belied his impressive physical strength.

Jean twisted around as he was dragged out the door of Bodt's. “Be right back?” he called uncertainly over his shoulder, waving quickly to Marco, who waved bewilderedly back.

Still dragging Jean by the wrist, Levi plodded around the nearest corner and into a back alleyway between Trost's sagging gray post office and Trost's sagging gray general store. Long shadows shaded the alley in charcoal tones as the burning vermillion sun sank below the horizon, turning everything black and red and gold.

“Levi,” Jean hissed, “Care to tell us why the hell you're here?” His amber eyes flicked worriedly around the area near where the three men stood, darting to what he could see of Trost's one street. No passerby seemed to be giving them a second glance save for Eren, who rounded the corner of the post office and walked furtively into the alley to join them, but Jean still felt like he was being watched.

“I've got something important to tell you,” Levi drawled. If you listened very closely, you could still hear the tiniest little hint of a French accent in his deep, intimidating voice. “A warning, I suppose.”

“And?” Jean looked agitated. Levi showing up was a warning in and of itself.

Jean looked at his companions apprehensively. Now that they were alone, pretenses could be dropped. Levi and Jean were not uncle and nephew, or of any other relation besides that of business. Along with his wife Hange Zoe and his friend Erwin Smith, Levi ran Survey Corporation, and he was one of the most terrifying people Jean had ever met.

For a moment no one spoke. Levi took another slow drag on his cigarette and brushed an invisible piece of dirt off the shoulder of his immaculate black jacket.

“And?” Eren's voice echoed Jean's previous question.

The bored expression was back on Levi's face, but the dark circles beneath his eyes and the deep furrow in his brow told another story. He looked exhausted and unsettled, and that worried Jean. That sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen to Levi.

Levi removed the cigarette from his lips and blew a smoke ring that hit Jean square in the face. “The message is: watch out for Annie Leonhardt.”

“What?” Jean exclaimed, taken aback. “Why watch out for...” He felt the color drain from his face. _Leonhardt._ “Oh.”

“She's got it out for you, kids.”

“But how does she...?” Eren asked, trailing off as he tried to understand what was going on. “How do you know that we need to watch out for her?”

“You mean how does she know it was you who robbed her? I haven't the slightest idea. Erwin said to watch out for her and sent me here; Ymir told us where you were when they delivered the first round of cattle of the season.” Levi didn't so much shrug as just barely lift one shoulder and raise his thin, dark eyebrows a bit, but coming from him, that was pretty emotional. “That's all.”

“So what do we do?” Jean kneaded the back of his neck with the calloused fingertips of his left hand and looked at Levi with anxious eyes.

“Nothing different, really. Armin's a smart boy. This hiding out in Trost is a good plan. Just don't do anything stupid.” Levi used the last bit of his cigarette to light yet another and threw the first one into the refuse heap in the back of the alley. “And don't go back to the Leonhardt Ranch again. Something tells me you'll regret it if you do.”

Jean made eye contact with Eren and gave him a slight nod. They could make this work.

“We'll be careful,” Jean said, but Levi had already turned away.

“I'm going to turn in for the night,” Levi said in a monotone as he walked out of the alley, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke wafting behind him. “See you two around.”

 

“Well, shit.” Eren rubbed the toe of his boot into the dirt of the alley floor and placed his hands on his hips.

Jean inhaled a big gulp of air and blew it out of puffed-up cheeks. That hadn't gone as badly as he had thought it would, but the fact that Levi had come all the way to Trost just to see them meant the situation was serious. He was far too important at Survey for Erwin to just send him out on a silly little errand. Where Levi went, bad news tended to follow.

 

No matter where you were in the state of Texas, if you mentioned the name Levi Fortier, people would immediately know who you were talking about. After the war, every Texan was in complete awe of him, no matter which side they'd fought on. Every ex-Confederate solider worshiped him, and every ex-Union soldier that had managed to see him on the battlefield and live was absolutely terrified of him.

Levi had been hailed as a war hero following the Battle of Galveston, where he'd saved the lives of nearly everyone in his company while simultaneously slaughtering those poor boys in blue, drenching them in their own blood without spilling a drop of his own. His superiors recognized his worth and promoted him to the rank of captain in no time. Most everyone felt that he deserved more, but he wouldn't take it. Perhaps having that much responsibility wasn't his thing; perhaps he enjoyed being in the heat of the battle more than he enjoyed moving pieces on a map like a chess game, but whatever his reasons, Levi stayed relatively small-time in the ranks of the military. He was known for his ruthlessness and battle skill, and no Union soldier wanted to be within a mile of him at any time.

 

To tell the truth, most everyone didn't want to be within a mile of him at any time. Levi was known for the bite of his tongue just as well as the bite of his bullets and bayonet. His personality had all the softness of sandpaper. The only people that could really stand to be around him for more than a few minutes were Sergeant Hange Zoe, a woman who cross-dressed as a man in order to fight for the South, and his superior, Commander Erwin Smith, who grew to become his closest friend. Over time, he learned to soften up a smidge around the two of them, and they grew to think his offensive brand of humor was actually sort of funny.

The average Texan didn't know any of that, though. The reason the name Levi Fortier spiked so much interest in the common folk was because eight months after the Confederacy's victory at Galveston, Levi was killed in action at the Battle of Palmito Ranch, along with Hange and Erwin.

Rumors about his death flew like ravens from town to town. No one was willing to believe that someone so valiant and skilled and downright _vicious_ in battle could just die like anyone else.

Some said he'd been murdered. Some said he'd committed suicide. Still others said he'd faked his death and escaped to France.

That last group was half right.

Levi hated to leave the army. He loved fighting; he loved defending the people and the places he cared about with gunpowder and his own antipathy for all things Northern, but all that paled in comparison to what he felt when he found out Hange was pregnant.

 

“I hope it's a boy,” he remembered her saying as she hummed deep in her throat and rubbed her rapidly swelling belly in the room they were renting somewhere in California. Erwin had had enough money to take all three of them out west to ride out the storm, and so they went.

“Me too,” Levi had answered, coming up behind her and standing on tiptoe to plant a kiss on her cheek.

“Levi,” she'd murmured suddenly, quietly, “What're we gonna do now that you're out of a job?”

“I don't know, _ma chérie.”_ His voice came out strained. Having soldiers depend on you was impossibly different from having a wife and a child do so.

The problem with being famous and faking your death is that if you happen to turn up alive, people start to ask questions. If Levi had been a lowly, mediocre foot soldier, he could have deserted without a problem, but a lot of important people knew who he was.

For the first time in a long time, Levi was truly afraid. It wasn't as if the reformed United States' army would've taken a leftover Confederate captain into their ranks.

Hange turned around to face him then, mahogany colored hair swishing as she swept it behind her ears. She noticed her husband's worried face. To anyone else, it probably looked just like his normal, disinterested face, but she knew him better than that.

Hange stooped down to Levi's height and took his pale face in her hands. “I've had the most wonderful idea,” she said, grinning broadly, brown eyes sparkling.

“What is it?” Levi replied levelly, warily. He loved the woman, but she was absolutely crazy.

“Ever thought of becoming an outlaw?”

Levi had smiled one of his rare, wry smiles. He'd been thinking the exact same thing.

 

Thank God for the Fortier-Zoes and their indomitable creativity. Without them and Mr. Smith, the Cadets would have been shit out of luck.

It was no accident that the two groups discovered each other. Armin, miniature genius that he was, had been tracking Survey for weeks while they had been seeking him out at the same time. Survey needed men on the ground nabbing the stock and the Cadets needed cash; the whole thing was a match made in heaven. In the future, it was likely that at least some of the Cadets would take on full-time positions there, once they were too old to be out crisscrossing state lines and evading the police.

There were some days, in fact, when Jean woke up with his head in the dirt of some blasted plain in the middle of nowhere-ville, U.S.A., that he found himself looking forward to it.

 

 _Warm beds for an extended period of time— unfathomable!,_ Jean found himself thinking grumpily as he and Eren made their way back to the bar. Neither man spoke, so Jean let his mind wander a bit, traveling down the possible avenues of the future. _A bed with soft pillows, like Marco's pillows. Inside an old house, maybe, with some trees out back and a white porch swing..._

“You sure we can do this?” Eren asked Jean abruptly, interrupting his thoughts. His green eyes were stormy with worry and doubt, and he focused them on his shoes as they walked.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Jean replied as they walked on. He hoped he sounded sincere; being forthright and unsarcastic in the face of raw emotion had never been one of his strong points.

Out of the corner of his eye Jean noticed that Eren still looked uncertain. He stopped in the middle of the street and turned to face his companion, trying to look reassuring and authoritative, like he actually knew what the hell he was doing.

“Don't look so scared, Eren. We can do it 'cause we have to, and we will. Lighten up.”

“If you say so, then sure.” Eren shook his head exasperatedly; he was surely getting himself all riled up for nothing. “As long as we're alive and all in one piece, I'm good. Now move your skinny ass. I want to finish my drink.”

 

In less than a minute, the door of Bodt's was banging open as Jean Kirschstein shouldered through it, Eren following behind him in the path he created. He had to push and shove a lot of people aside to get back to their stools at the bar, but eventually they made it.

The place was starting to fill up; the sun had set a few minutes ago, and everywhere you looked, the locals were coming out to play. A steady, raucous hum of conversation was abuzz inside the bar, and Marco had to raise his voice a bit to make himself heard.

“What was that all about?” Marco yelled over the noise. He gestured to Jean and Eren's empty stools before running off to pour someone else a glass of something brown and wheaty. He'd been very careful to make sure no one took them while they were away.

Jean scanned the bar for Levi before answering. He let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding when he saw that he wasn't there. “Nothing much,” he called back as he sat down.

“You sure? He seemed kind of...”

“Like a complete and total overly acerbic son of a bitch?” Eren asked, grinning maniacally.

Marco blushed to the tips of his ears, the freckles on his face standing out a little more vividly against the flush of pink that flowed up into his dark cheeks. “I wasn't gonna say that in so many words, but yeah. What you said.”

“Then you were right on the money,” Jean laughed. “That's uncle Levi for you. Kind of an ass, but we love him just the same. Say, Marco, could I have a pint when you get a minute?”

“'Course,” Marco replied just as another customer waved him over, bawdily yelling something that sounded something like a cross between inebriated yodeling and this: _Mar-kowe? Cun I hayuve wun beeyur pleeyuz?_

“One second,” Marco said to Jean as he wagged one finger in the air to indicate the time span, then took off in a hurry and ran to one of his taps to drain some amber ale into a glass for the fine gentleman who'd called his name. He scampered back past them to deliver the beer to the man, setting it down before he even stopped moving.  He served his patrons with the practiced ease of someone who'd been in the business for years, always placing a freckled sorrel pinky on the bar top before putting the glass all the way down.

Marco stretched up to reach the line of glasses on the top shelf that lined the wall behind the counter. They chinked against each other as he pulled one down for Jean. Marco quickly tugged down on his cotton shirt, covering the strip of freckled skin at the base of his spine that he had unwittingly exposed reaching for the glass. He filled it up at the nearest tap and slid it along the counter to Jean, who grabbed it and began drinking it down. 

“How much?” he asked when he separated himself from his drink and took a breath. For such a small town establishment, Bodt's served damned good beer.

“No charge for you,” Marco said, grinning, before running off to refill someone's vodka tonic.

Eren's bow-shaped mouth hung open. For one brief, shining moment, he was too impressed with Jean's apparent acquisition to make a joke. The magic wore off quick enough, though. 

“Free drinks for our hero. So the feelings are mutual, then,” Eren said, lightly jabbing Jean in the ribs with his elbow.

“Perhaps,” Jean replied slyly, studying Marco as he worked.  _Such deft hands,_ he thought as he watched the bartender mix and deliver a drink for none other than Hitch, who sat coquettishly flirting with a man at a table near the front of the room. 

He then proceeded to think about a few...  _dirtier_ things those hands might be good for. 

Jean stared off into space, completely zoned out as he ran his index finger around the rim of his curvy pint glass. A small smile was affixed upon his sharp features, softening them up just a little. After a minute he realized what he was doing and suddenly found himself blushing very deeply.

“I'm sorry, what?” he asked Eren as he shook his head to clear it, sending his shaggy undercut bangs flying. “Did you say something?”

“I said, good luck with that one.” Eren smiled tightly and waved lazily to Jean with a toffee-colored hand. “I think I'm gonna follow Levi's trail and go back to the inn. I feel like I'm coming down with a headache, and if I am, booze is probably one of the last things I need. Make my excuses to your boy toy, will ya?”

Jean snorted, half in irritation, half in amusement. “Night, shithead.”

~ ~ ~

After his little altercation with Mr. Fortier, Sheriff Braun had chugged his beer and vacated the premises of Bodt's. No use sticking around just to be made a laughing stock. 

Most days, he loved his job. Taking care of his own was what Reiner was all about. But there would always be days like today, when someone was too drunk, or too stupid, or just too plain argumentative to cooperate, and those days were Reiner's bad days. 

Deep down, he sort of knew that no one would have cared much about that guy taunting him, but it still made Reiner feel like a stupid child.

Today was a bad sort of day. 

It was 8:30. Reiner felt stupid sitting doing nothing by the window in his house as the red sunlight died, forcing him to light up his kerosene lamp to see. He had tried to read a book earlier, but he kept getting distracted.

Reiner sighed and dragged a large, square hand roughly over his face. He dug around in his desk drawer for a minute, taking special care to not knock over the inkwell on top of his official business papers. Eventually he found a sheet of paper and the fountain pen he'd been looking for; that blasted inkwell and quill set was an absolutely ridiculous way to go about writing a letter. Some people just didn't know how to give gifts.

Reiner stuck the end of the pen in his mouth for a moment and frowned. A moment later, he picked it up and began to write.

_Dearest Cousin,_

_It has been so long since you came to see us here in Trost. I know you are busy at home, but I have been thinking of you very much recently and have been wondering how you are. It would do me good to have a call from you again. Not much has been going on here of course; a few travelers have stopped by, but as for everything else, much is the same, and life is good. Even so, to see your face would be a welcome change. You know I am always here, so just make plans to show up whenever it suits you. Next time you find yourself with a few days and nothing to do, come and see me._

_I hope to see you soon,_

_Cousin Reiner._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think this every other wednesday one in the morning thing is becoming a routine  
> wah
> 
> also omg i hope i did levi right please tell me what you think i want him to be right so badly  
> he is like shrek in that he is a stinky onion with many layers but has something that resembles a heart at the center
> 
> NEXT chapter is where the ball gets a'rollin. In the words of Scar, be prepaaaaaaaaaaaared.


	5. Burning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jean feels things.

After Eren returned to the inn, Jean and Marco spent the remainder of the evening much the same as they had spent the previous one, hanging out at the bar until the rest of Bodt's patrons trickled drunkenly out. The difference was that this time, Jean actually forced himself to go home— after making promises to visit the next morning, of course. The rest of the night passed on without event, as did the next day, and the next, and the next. Jean and Marco spent at least part of every day together, learning more and more each other and both generally enjoying the other's company.

As time went on, the searing summer sun melted the days into two weeks, but to Jean, it felt like nothing. Being around Marco was a joy he hadn't expected to discover in this brown hellhole of a town. He felt not only safe, but really, actually happy.

Some people, however, were not in quite the same mood.

 

Far away from Trost, a strong breeze whistled through a wide valley, blowing the summery scents of green grass and yellow sunshine through the open windows of the Leonhardt house. Annie Leonhardt sat at her kitchen table, sipping a glass of cool sweet tea and reading a letter.

_Dearest Cousin, it began:_

_It has been so long since you came to see us here in Trost. I know you are busy at home, but I have been thinking of you very much recently and have been wondering how you are..._

Down an oak-paneled hall, a clock bonged eight times; since it was a Saturday, work hours stared later than usual. Bertholdt Hoover, ever punctual, tipped his hat towards the lady as he made his way toward the back of the house, ready for another day of cattle wrangling.

“Any special instructions for today, ma'am?” he asked in his nervous, earnest way.

“No, thank you,” she replied as she continued to read. “Care for a scone before you go?”

“No, but thank ya, ma'am,” he answered as he left.

A hint of a smile appeared on Annie's thin lips. Of all the cowhands she'd had in her service, Mr. Hoover was by far her favorite. He was shy beyond the point of sense, but he did what he was told in the proper way and learned quickly. Take those traits and add an Alabama accent thicker than the mud at the bottom of the Mississippi, and you'd have a recipe for one good old southern boy.

Annie waved a goodbye to Bertholdt, then turned her attention back to the table and the letter resting upon it. She took another sip of tea and read the last two lines aloud. _“ I hope to see you soon, Cousin Reiner. ”_

 

Truthfully, it _had_ been quite some time since they'd seen each other—four months, give or take. They usually paid visits to each other at least every two. Growing up without siblings, Reiner had been the closest thing Annie had had to an older brother. When her parents had shipped her off to finishing school in Charleston in hopes of turning her into a real lady and mollifying her fighting spirit, she had been so infuriated about having to leave him that she'd gotten herself kicked out on purpose. Once her father had realized that she meant business, he placed her at the head of his company: Leonhardt Beeves, Inc, which made her very happy. She'd grown up with the ranch, and now that her parents were retired, she got to run it.

She still had the stupid Charleston accent, though.

Annie stood from her chair and began making her way towards the stairs that lead to her bedroom. As she walked, she resolved that she must go and visit Reiner within a fortnight. Recently, she'd been too consumed with finding those cow thieves to do much socializing, but the letter was a much-needed reminder of her other obligations. Catching the culprits could be put on hold for the time being. Perhaps this break from the pursuit would lend her the eye of objectivity.

On her way upstairs, Annie ruminated on how livid she'd been when Bertholdt knocked upon her bedroom door three weeks ago to tell her that Bessie, Primrose, Maggie, and Cinnamon were missing. He'd been sweating bullets, but whether that was from fear of her reaction or because of his proximity to the rifle he had slung over his back, Annie couldn't have told. He'd stared down at his boots as he delivered the news—you'd have thought he was a little boy being scolded for stealing a cookie from the jar when no one was looking.

 

“Ma'am,” he'd said, “Earlier this mornin' while you was still sleepin', I thought I saw somethin' out there in the dark of the hills, and now I think I was right, 'cause four of your girls is gone.”

“Gone?” She'd asked in angry disbelief, irate both from being woken before her usual time and in light of the news. “How can they be _gone,_ Mr. Hoover?”

“Well,” he began in a small voice. “My best guess is whatever I saw was really rustlers, ma'am. But they was so far away, we dint have any chance of gettin' to 'em.”

Annie closed her large blue eyes and inhaled sharply, the nostrils on her prominent hooked nose flaring. “There's nothing we can do about it now. But Mr. Hoover?

“Yes?”

“Let's find them. Quickly.”

“Yessum!” he had squeaked in reply. The bullets of sweat had seemingly become a river of the same substance, and Bertholdt had to restrain himself from running for the door. If there was one thing he hated, it was conflict.

 

For the past two weeks, Annie had been doing all kinds of research in her free time, trying to deduce who exactly had rustled her cows. She'd sent whoever she could spare from the help staff out to all the closest towns and asked them to talk to the police, the locals, anybody who might know anything. As of yet, only one had returned with anything promising: in Santa Maria, a nearby city, the search was on for two cow rustlers by the names of Eren Jaeger and Jean Kirschstein.

It wasn't much, but it was a lead, and after visiting Reiner, Annie intended to keep pursuing it. She ran a tight ship, and _no one_ was going to take what was hers and get away with it.

Annie finished her walk upstairs and pushed open the door to her bedroom, where she sat down at her desk and began to write out a reply with quill and ink.

_Dearest Reiner..._

~ ~ ~

Miles from the Leonhardt Ranch, Jean Kirschstein found himself waking up much too early. He groaned and shut his eyes tight against the unwelcome daylight streaming through the open window of his and Eren's shared room.

After a few moments of rolling around uncomfortably on his lumpy mattress, Jean came to the unsatisfactory realization that he was unable to go back to sleep. He shifted onto his back and stared up at the ceiling.

“Eren—” he began, but stopped short when he looked over to see that his comrade was still fast asleep, dark hair ruffled on his pillow. His mouth hung open unattractively as he snored lightly. Eren wasn't as terrible a sleeper as Jean, but he had his moments.

Jean raked a hand through his bangs. _What're we gonna do today, Kirschstein?_ he thought sarcastically as he lay there, staring at the ceiling beams with tired, squinted amber eyes. He thought that maybe if he stayed where he was and willed himself to sleep, it might actually happen.

It didn't happen.

With a sigh of defeat, Jean finally gave in and hauled himself out of bed, cursing mildly under his breath as he went. After fixing himself a light breakfast, he sat down in an ugly green armchair by the window with a sketchbook he didn't really have much desire to work in and cracked it open. He sketched out a few lines on a study he was working on, but soon decided he didn't like them and closed the book.

In all truth, what Jean wanted to do more than anything at that moment was to go visit Marco. Since Eren was asleep, there wasn't really much else to do anyway. But it was rather early in the morning, and besides, he was worried that he had been acting too forward. They'd been seeing each other pretty consistently for the past two weeks, but what if Marco wasn't actually as interested as Jean had thought he might be? What if he was already seeing someone? That was unlikely, since Trost held about thirty people and Jean hadn't seen Marco hang around any of them for very long, but still. Jean kicked himself internally for never having asked if he had a significant other.

 _It's such an obvious thing, you dumb shit,_ he thought to himself as he sat in the chair and stared absently out the window at the line of division between the brilliantly blue Texas sky and the vast, dead-looking brownness surrounding Trost. _How could you not ask?_

 _What if..._ Jean suddenly thought, horrified, _he's straight?!_

“Ungghhhhh,” Jean groaned in exasperation, shoving his face into his hands. He shut his eyes tight and tried not to think about Marco. He really, really doubted that the other man was strictly into the ladies, but neither one of them had tried anything yet, so... what? The tension between them was nearly tangible, yet neither of them had done a single thing about it.

 _I am an idiot,_ he grumbled internally. _Why haven't I made a goddamned move?_

Jean answered his own question. _Because I am a stupid piece of shit. That's why._

Suddenly there came a knock at the door.

The noise yanked Jean abruptly out of his woolgathering. “Shit!” he yelped as all the muscles in his body jumped of their own accord. After taking a moment to calm himself down, he answered the door, leaving it swinging open.

Marco Bodt stood in the entryway, one fist still raised in knocking position.

“Hello!” Jean said, a touch of shock creeping into his tone. Seeing Marco was a pleasant surprise, but it was still a surprise.

Marco met Jean's wide eyes and smiled brightly, a multitude of freckles folding into his dimples. “Are you coming or not?”

Jean cocked a dark eyebrow. “Coming where?” he asked confusedly. He'd been at Bodt's until late again last night and remembered saying he'd go and visit today, but so early?

“To the bar?” Marco replied, his voice lifting on the end, turning his words into a question. “We made plans,” he said a little more quietly, blush faintly spreading across his cheeks as he saw that Jean was still in his night clothes.

“This early?”

“Well, yeah...”

Jean smiled. “Let me get dressed, and I will. Come in for a bit, will you?”

Jean retreated from the door and Marco followed suit, shutting it behind him as he walked into the room. Jean rifled through his trunk for a pair of pants and a shirt and headed for the bathroom, calling “Have a seat!” and “Just a second!” to Marco as he left to change.

After Jean left, Marco sat down in the ugly green armchair to wait. He scanned the room for a moment before his eyes landed on Jean's leather bound sketchbook.

“Do you mind if I look through your drawings?” he yelled to Jean through the bathroom door.

“Not at all!” Jean yelled back as he hopped around on one leg, trying to pull on his pants.

Marco thumbed open the cover and flicked through a few pages. “Who's this?” he asked, pointing at random to a realistic portrait of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman as Jean emerged from the bathroom.

“That's ma,” Jean replied simply as he walked over to where Marco was sitting and leaned over the back of the chair. He'd been trying to draw her portrait based on an old photograph he had in his possession. In the picture, she was just barely smiling, wearing a gold locket and gown and an elaborately coiffed hairstyle.

“She's a beautiful woman,” Marco commented respectfully as he studied the drawing.

“You could say that,” Jean answered, a hint of agitation coloring his voice. Suddenly he felt that he didn't really want to talk about her with Marco—he was too kind a person to hear about her.

Unfortunately, Marco could not read minds. “Are you close?” he continued as he twisted around to get a better look at Jean.

“Um... no, not really. We had a rather major... disagreement... a few years back and she... well, she kicked me out. We used to be before that, but I haven't seen her in years, actually.”

Marco's eyes widened and then squinted with pity and hurt. “I'm sorry to hear that, Jean.”

“Yeah, um. Didn't have the greatest childhood after the fact. I kind of wandered a bit on my own during the war, and afterward I ended up sort of near here... and then I found uncle Levi, and my friends, and we all went into business together. Since then we've all just been doing our thing, I guess.” Jean tore his eyes from Marco's and stared at his hands, tense and white-knuckled on the back of the chair.

An awkward silence followed. The golden dust motes floating in the air seemed to freeze in their rotations as the two men struggled to speak.

Jean cleared his throat forcefully and broke it by changing the subject. “So,” he said quickly, “What about your family?”

Marco let out a huff of air in wordless gratitude; he was happy he hadn't had to be the one to restart the conversation. “Well,” he began slowly, “Momma died having me—that's why I don't have siblings—and daddy raised me by himself. I had an aunt from Jinae who took me in while he was away fighting, but he came home just fine. He passed about two years ago; had some sickness. Took him fairly quick, thankfully. Didn't have to suffer.”

“I guess that's good to hear, in an odd way,” Jean said, his mouth twisting into a rueful smile.

This time it was Marco who looked away. “Jean, if you don't mind my asking—”

 _Oh shit_ , Jean thought. The lead weight of panic settled somewhere in his stomach. _I knew I shouldn't have said anything._

“—What exactly happened that you got kicked out? I don't really see any reason that anyone could do that to someone like you.”

Jean sighed deeply and closed his eyes. He'd let himself get carried away making friends with this man; in a few weeks he would probably be leaving town, never to see Marco again. There was no point in telling him anything.

All at once Jean realized that even if he might be leaving, he didn't care. For some stupid reason, he wanted Marco to know what had happened.

 

Jean looked Marco straight in the face. “She caught me kissing a boy and didn't agree with it, to put it extremely lightly. There was a lot of screaming and crying and accusations of being unholy.”

Marco's eyes grew very wide. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Jean, I—" Marco began before shutting his mouth abruptly. After a short silence, he tried again. “I know from experience that sorry doesn't really mean anything, but it's what people say when they don't know how to help but they want to, you know what I mean?”

“I— you're not completely and utterly disgusted?” _Please,_ please _let me have been right and let him be gay,_ Jean silently prayed to whatever god was listening.

“Jean,” Marco said, smiling affectionately while rolling his eyes. “We're friends, right?”

“Yes...?” The sudden change of subject left Jean confused. He was having a hard time following where Marco was going with this.

“As your friend, I don't give a shit who you're with as long as they wanna be with you.”

Jean then realized that maybe, just maybe, he didn't want to leave Marco Bodt at all.

 

Jean was just about to speak when Eren Jaeger chose that precise moment to wake up, sit bolt upright in bed, and blurt out, “Holy _shit,_ that was a crazy dream. Killer giants everywhere...”

“Good morning to you too, Eren,” Jean groused in Eren's general direction. Classic Jaeger, always ruining the moment.

“Oh!” Eren replied, whipping his head around in the direction of Jean's voice, green eyes wide and unfocused from being dragged out of sleep. “Hi. Morning Jean, Marco. Where'sthegoddamnedcoffee?”

“Countertop.” Jean jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the small kitchen area of the room. “Help yourself.”

“Thanks,” Eren mumbled, his morning voice thick and scratchy. He rolled out of bed and staggered towards the coffee pot, dragging his blankets with him. After pouring himself a steaming mug, he addressed Jean and Marco once more. “I'm gonna go down to see Levi, okay?”

“Sure,” Jean said insouciantly at the same time as Marco said, “Tell him I say hello.”

Eren downed his coffee in under a minute and retreated to the bathroom to slip on real clothes. “See y'all later!” he called as he walked out the door. Jean and Marco watched him go in silence.

 

“You ready to go?” Marco finally asked, shooting Jean a sideward glance.

“'Course I am,” Jean responded playfully as he moved to stand in the doorway and beckoned for Marco to follow. Immediately after closing the door, he happened to look down at his feet.

“Wait! I forgot shoes!” Jean shouted. He turned around quickly to go back inside, but found his way blocked by Marco.

They were suddenly very, very close together, with noses nearly touching, and Jean could not help but notice the trace of blush rising in Marco's freckled cheeks. Jean could feel that his face was on fire as well, but he decided to throw caution to the wind and be bold.

“Marco,” Jean said softly as he leaned his forehead against the other man's, loving the way his name lilted on his tongue, “We're not just friends, are we.”

He didn't phrase it as a question because he was almost sure that he already knew the answer.

Marco closed his eyes and took the plunge. “No, we're not.”

That was all Jean needed to hear.

 

Ever so slightly, Jean pushed himself up onto the balls of his feet and kissed Marco's dewy rose petal lips softly, just barely brushing them with his own.

Marco immediately kissed back, but fearfully, treating Jean as if he were made of delicate sheets of glass, feeling that if he pushed too hard, he might break.

Jean pulled back after a moment and opened his eyes just a sliver, studying Marco closely, searching his face for signs of reaction. Marco's coffee-brown eyes were open, pupils blown wide and cheeks suffused with burning blush. His breaths came fast and shallow as he stared back at Jean.

 _“Jean,”_ Marco murmured quietly into the space between their mouths.

Jean felt something within him roar, something animal and fiery that had been begging to surface for the past two weeks, and he gave in to it.  

When he brought Marco to him again, they fit together like puzzle pieces falling into place.

Marco felt his lips part as Jean drew him closer, kissed him harder, pulled him deeper into the dream with the slightest flick of his tongue. Marco then decided that Jean was not glass; he was steel, and he was going to let him know it.

 

Jean could feel his heart speeding up until it seemed to beat outside his chest, a separate entity frenzied with desire, pushing hot blood through his veins as he moved his hands up to cup Marco's face. Marco sighed against his mouth and slid a hand into Jean's hair, the other trailing down his arm and coming to rest at the small of his back. Jean shoved Marco back against the door, pushing his wiry body against him, trying desperately to get closer and closer until there was no more space in between.

As Marco pulled away to plant a string of kisses down Jean's jawline, Jean felt that he might die of need. To finally kiss him after this ridiculous period of waiting and wanting was like finding land after being lost at sea; Marco was a beacon of light in the hurricane of Jean's heart.

After a moment, Marco returned to Jean's lips, kissing him hard enough to bruise.

 _“Why didn't we do this sooner?”_ Jean said almost inaudibly as he exhaled a shallow breath in the interval between one kiss and the next. His eyes flew open and then closed involuntarily as Marco ran his hands down his spine, stopping to grab at his waist.

 _“Dunno,”_ Marco breathed as he kissed one corner of Jean's mouth.

Jean could feel himself quickly getting lost in the kiss. It was simple lust but also feeling, deep feeling that should not have existed after two weeks of knowing each other, but there it was. All Jean knew was that he would have sold his soul to keep it from ending.

The two men spent another few minutes tangled up in each other against the door, kissing and moaning and tearing at clothing furiously. Eventually, Jean had to come up for air. The sudden loss of contact pained him; something vital felt like it was missing, but he smiled a small smile anyway and placed a slow peck on Marco's full mouth before speaking.

“Marco,” he whispered, looking steadily into the other man's eyes, “Are you ready to go now?”

Marco grinned deviously, the expression jarring Jean's angelic impression of him forever. “Let's get out of here,” he growled, smirking, as he grabbed Jean by the hand and they descended the stairs together.

~ ~ ~

For the next two weeks, Jean and Marco were nearly inseparable. They spent every day, all day together, talking and laughing and very often, kissing. Jean learned the shape of Marco by measures, first trailing a thin finger along one smooth, brown collarbone, then the curve of a freckled shoulder blade, then a lean thigh as time passed, memorizing the shape of him through touch. Every minute was a new adventure, even if all they did was lie side by side on Marco's bed and read their books, immersed in a content silence only broken by the repetitive flipping of pages. Jean couldn't remember a time when he'd been this happy in another person's company for so long.

At the same time, a creeping fear was working its way into Jean's mind. He knew that soon Armin or Mikasa would be coming to collect him and Eren, and he didn't want to go.

 

One night after spending all day at the bar with Marco, Jean decided to go and see Eren. He'd been neglecting his friend terribly of late; they'd hardly been around each other at all.

The stars were out that evening, twinkling like diamonds against the silky blackness of the night sky in Trost as Jean walked from Marco's apartment back to his room in the inn.

“Hello,” Jean said congenially as he pushed open the door to the room. Eren sat upon his bed, nose buried in a book. “Hello,” he replied curtly without looking up.

Jean shrugged and walked over to his trunk, where he began laying clothes out on the bed. As he gathered his things, the silence in the room grew heavier, until Jean could have sworn you could've reached out and grabbed it.

After Jean had gotten everything he needed, he shot Eren a concerned glance out of the corner of his eye. “You okay?” he asked tentatively. When Eren was angry, being around him was like trying to dance the flamenco on eggshells. “You're acting weird.”

Eren sighed deeply through his nose. “I'm worried about you,” he said pragmatically as he scanned the lines of the book. He couldn't read them anymore; after those words, his focus had abandoned him.

 _“Me?”_ Jean asked, surprised. “Why are you worried about _me?”_

Suddenly Eren looked up sharply, jerking his shaggy head in Jean's direction and slamming the book shut. “Because you're getting too attached to Marco, and nothing good is going to come of it, Jean.”

Jean felt his face flush with embarrassment. “Who said I was getting too attached?” he lied. He was absolutely attached, and leaving was going to _hurt._

“You didn't have to say anything. I can see it. Don't lie to me and say you're not, because you are, and it's probably going to come back and bite you in the ass very soon.”

Jean ran his tongue over his teeth in vexation. “So what?” he replied heatedly. “Why do you care so much?”

Eren stared back at Jean, working his jaw in frustration, but said nothing.

Suddenly Jean had a crazy thought. “You're not jealous, are you?” he wondered aloud, eyes wide and limbs frozen with shock as he contemplated this new possibility.

Eren sighed and shook his head angrily. “No! _No,_ goddammit! Jean, that's been over for _years._ I'm not jealous! I'm worried about your mental health because you're my _friend,_ you piece of shit, and I want you to be okay, and when we leave and you get ripped away from this stupid boy of yours it's gonna sting a hell of a lot more than you're prepared for!”

“It's none of your goddamned business, Jaeger!” Jean yelled, getting to his feet without realizing it. “It's none of your business who I'm with! I really like Marco, okay? He's a nice guy, and he's making me happier than I've been in a long-ass time, so what makes you think you have any say in this?” Jean turned his gaze away from Eren; he didn't want to see his face.

Eren continued on anyway, standing quickly and balling his hands into fists. “Why is it my damned business? I'll tell you why. As hard as it might be to believe, I care about you, Jean, and we're leaving soon, and Marco is gonna get left behind, and there is _nothing_ you can do about it.”

Jean wheeled on him. He was sure that they were waking the neighbors with their fight, but he was well beyond the point of caring. “You think I don't know that? I do, asshole, and it's driving me nuts. Let me figure it out myself."

“I just want to keep you safe!"

"Jesus, Eren. Let me live my own damn life!”

Eren's eyes looked like they were going to pop straight out of his skull. A vein pulsed angrily in his forehead. "I get that you're starved for love Jean, I get it. You missed out as a kid, fine. All I'm saying is, I don't wanna see you hurt over some stupid fling!" Eren threw his hands into the air, gesticulating wildly as they fought.

 _“You shut your mouth,”_   Jean snarled, crossing the room until he and Eren stood close together, too close for comfort. “You don't talk about my mother. You shut your damn mouth _right_ now, or so help me I will shut it _for you.”_

 _“Go ahead,”_ Eren growled nastily, eyes ablaze as he stared Jean down.

Jean pulled his right arm back and swung, but his heart wasn't in it. A sick _thwap_ followed. Eren hissed and clutched his jaw where Jean had hit it.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” Jean said quietly as he left the room.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's gettin hot in here  
> so punch your friend in the face
> 
> also have i ever mentioned that i have a tumblr and that the url of that tumblr is frodobaguette and that you should come say hi to me there


	6. Save a Horse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WOW i'm sossosososooooo sorry that this chapter is so late, i've been the busiest of all busy bees and during the time I normally allot myself to write, I came down with a cold and spent all my time doing makeup work for school. Yay. BUt anyway, here's six! It's hella frickin long, more so than any other chapter so far.
> 
> Get ready for a thrill ride, dudes.

The cool night wind whipped across Jean Kirschstein's face as he made his way from the inn to Bodt's. His straight, dark eyebrows were drawn low over his eyes as he stomped down Trost's one street towards Marco's front door.

Clouds moved across the sky from the east, dousing the lights of the stars one by one. A thunderstorm was brewing in the distance, and its howling winds rattled the old boards of Trost's buildings, making them shudder under its force. As the wind picked up even more, fat raindrops began falling from the sky in earnest. They smacked into Jean aggressively as he tromped along, violently and unnecessarily kicking up clods of mud in his wake, head ducked tight and back hunched to avoid the rain. In the time that spanned the walk from the inn to the bar, he felt like a human trip wire, ready to trigger a deadly explosion as soon as someone or something set him off.

 

 _“Goddamn piece of shit.... had no right....”_ Jean muttered angrily under his breath as he trudged onward, running his hands through the longer part of his undercut over and over. His thoughts were running circles in his brain like a dog chasing its tail.

Jean was unbelievably happy, but he was horribly sad; he felt safer than he had in a long time, but he was terrified; he really cared for Marco, but soon he would have to leave him: in short, Jean was a bit of a mess. There was no clear way out of the hole he had dug himself into; as far as he could see, no handy escape ladder existed in this situation.

When you got down to it, the real problem was that Jean knew deep down that Eren was right, and he didn't know what to do about it.

Thus the kicking.

It was a good way to take his mind off things.

Finally Jean reached the door of the bar. After unlocking the door with the key Marco had lent him, he climbed the stairs to Marco's room and let himself in.

 

Marco Bodt himself was still awake, sprawled out on his stomach on the bed, reading a thick novel by candlelight. When he heard the door open, he quickly dog-eared a yellowed page, placed the book on his nightstand, and stood up, walking over to greet Jean.

“Hey,” he said warmly as he approached Jean from across the room. He stopped short when he saw the other man's face.

“Hey,” Jean replied glumly from the doorway. His right hand was still stinging where he had punched Eren, but the anger that had possessed him to do so seemed to be leaking away until all he felt was a sinking sense of exhaustion.

“Jean, Jean, come here,” Marco said soothingly, practically sprinting the length of the apartment to wrap his boyfriend up in a tight hug, completely ignoring the fact that he was damp all over from the storm. He gave him a quick peck on the lips and then pulled back, studying the other man's ochre eyes, surrounded by frown crinkles. “What happened?”

Jean let out a heavy sigh and looked away. “Eren and I got into a fight— just stupid shit, goddamned ridiculous, I swear. We were both being assholes, really. He said some things I didn't wanna hear, and I got mad... and I _might_ have punched him a little.”

Marco frowned. “Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.” Marco leaned back in for another kiss and then released Jean from his embrace. He took him by the hand and lead him over to the bed they'd been sharing for the past two weeks without saying anything more.

They sat in silence for a while, side by side, not quite touching. After a few tranquil minutes had gone by, Marco tilted his head towards Jean, who was staring off into space, lost in thought.

“Hey.”

“Hm?”

“You _sure_ you don't wanna talk about it?”

Jean exhaled deeply through his nose and rubbed a hand along the back of his neck, avoiding Marco's worried gaze. He took a moment to think before replying.

“Maybe I do. I... I'm not— I don't— I don't know.” He lifted his eyes to meet the other man's, staring into them tiredly. “I don't know what I wanna do, Marco.”

Marco quickly grabbed Jean's hand and kissed it on the knuckles. He began to rub slow circles onto the back of Jean's hand with his thumb, making sure to keep his eyes locked on Jean's to ensure that he knew he was listening.

 

“Marco, you know I've gotta leave soon,” Jean said almost inaudibly as he stared at the ground, eyes unfocused. His tone left no elbow room for questioning.

“Mmhmm.”

Jean felt a sinking feeling settle somewhere in the area of his chest. “That's what Eren and I were fighting about.”

Marco was silent. A thoughtful expression rested lightly on his face.

Jean took a deep breath and kept going. “He doesn't want me to get too attached to you and then have to run off and leave you here. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know how to handle... this. You. Me,” Jean said. He gestured listlessly to Marco and then himself.

Marco smiled softly. “And are you attached?”

Jean let out a low chuckle. “I'd say I am a bit, yeah.”

Marco was beaming.

Looking at him, Jean felt something within him spark, like the first lick of flame running up a pile of kindling and timber, ready to blaze into a roaring fire, full of warmth and light.

“Marco,” Jean said sincerely, “I've been with plenty of men, and trust me that when I say you've been better to me than all of them combined, I mean it.”

“Well,” Marco interrupted, grinning drolly, “I haven't been with all that many, but I quite like you.”

Jean smiled widely for a fleeting moment, but then his face fell again. He leveled his hazel gaze on Marco, hushing him with his eyes. Marco read the seriousness in his expression and shut up instantly.

“Marco, darlin', I don't wanna leave.”

 

Jean didn't say it happily. The fire he'd been feeling before died behind his eyes, and as it faded, Jean himself felt a little like he had been snuffed out. A shadow passed over his sharp features once again, softening them— but not in a happy way, not in a comforting way.

When Marco looked at Jean's face, it seemed as if he were seeing Jean through a blanket of fog, and that the other man was suddenly impossibly far away, drifting alone in the mist.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Jean sat and stared at Marco with his mouth shut tight. He felt like a wet rag that had been twisted tightly and wrung out to dry; he couldn't find a scrap of a sentence or fragment of a syllable left in him to say.

Marco, on the other hand, suddenly found his mind to scrambling to find the proper words— there were too many, and he needed to let them out somehow.

Marco moved his hand up from where it was still holding Jean's to skim along the other man's sharp cheekbone lightly, the barest of caresses, like the sliver of the crescent moon brushing against the night sky. Where his fingertips touched Jean's face, Jean felt streaks of lightning crackle beneath his skin. Outside, a thunderclap boomed.

What Marco saw in the other man's eyes was scaring him.“Jean,” he whispered, leaving his hand where it was, “What can I do to help you?”

 

Jean didn't say anything for at least a minute. He was thinking hard.

_What would help me tonight?_ Jean brooded as he sat there, immobile and silent. When he'd first arrived in Trost, Marco was just going to be a fling, and he supposed that when you looked at it a certain way, he still was. They'd only acted on their desire for one another two weeks ago, and they'd only known each other for a month. 

 

The real dilemma was that though Jean didn't love him— you couldn't love someone you'd just met— he could  _see_ what it would be like to love him, to stay with him, to learn all his little quirks and habits until they knew each other, inside and out, like the backs of their hands. Jean could see getting up every morning and finding Marco in his bed beside him, curled up right next to him, soft and warm. He could see the two of them finding a home, beginning and ending each day together, hell, maybe even starting a family someday. An endless road of possibilities stretched out before him, an unceasing stream of  _what-ifs._ He could imagine what their future would be like, even though it had a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening. 

Jean knew what love wasn't. His relationship with Eren and the tension between him and his mother had made that very clear to Jean, so now, being confronted with someone so pure and kind and true was some kind of miracle. Maybe it would work out, maybe it wouldn't, but Jean wanted to at least give things a chance.

 

Everything was hinging on outrunning the police and Annie Leonhardt. If Jean was able to escape them, he would be free to carry on living the way he wanted, whether that included Marco or not—and he was beginning to sorely hope that it would— because either way, he'd be safe again. But right now, his life was hanging in the balance like the sword above Damocles' head: one wrong move, and the lies and the law would come crashing down upon him, and Jean's time with Marco would end. Probably forever.

That sounded horrible.

Jean could see the life that Marco would bring with him, turning over and over in a kaleidoscope of half-fulfilled perhapses and uncharted maybes; he could almost touch it, _taste_ it— it was the sort of vision half-seen in the hazy moment of weightlessness between wakefulness and sleep, but it could be real, if they tried.

And Jean was in pain, because he wanted to.

He didn't know what to do.

 

Marco's low voice brought Jean out of his tangled mind and back to reality. “Any thoughts?” he asked deviously, one corner of his mouth twitching up into a crooked smile.

Jean raised an eyebrow confusedly. “On what?” He was still feeling down, but one look at Marco told him he wasn't going to be that way for long.

The other man said nothing, just continued to smile in that maddening way. His full lips, quirked off to one side, were a challenge against Jean's black mood. He placed a hand on Jean's thigh and scooted a little bit closer to his boyfriend on the bed.

Marco had decided that he knew _exactly_ what Jean needed to cheer him up, and he was ready and willing to give it to him.

Jean gulped. His mouth might have been watering a little.

“Thoughts... on how I should make you feel better?” Marco finally responded, practically purring.

It wasn't really a question so much as a bridge between one state of mind and the next.

 

Marco pulled the other man towards him, drawing him onto his lap. He placed a hand on Jean's shoulder and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “You want me to make you feel better?” Marco continued on, grinning roguishly, “Because I'm getting this feeling like I can definitely do that for you right now.”

Jean made a rumbling noise of agreement deep in his throat. “You know I do,” he responded, grinning eagerly as Marco shifted him off his lap and pushed him down onto the fluffy white duvet. A distraction was exactly what he needed.

 _This is what I'm talking about,_ Jean thought enthusiastically as he stretched out supinely on Marco's bed. He beckoned for his boyfriend to come closer with a curl of his fingers.

Marco took a moment to blow out the candle on the nightstand. He flashed a Cheshire Cat's grin at Jean just a second before the flame died.

“Good.”

~ ~ ~

Jean and Marco had a late morning the next day. By the time both men were awake and functional, the sun had already crept nearly halfway across the blue summer sky, and after a brief period of lazy cuddles, it was reluctantly decided that duty called. By the time the two of them finally rolled out of bed, traipsed downstairs, and set up the bar, it was two o'clock in the afternoon.

The summer sun was shining brightly through the windows of Bodt's, throwing everything in the room into sharp relief, hard-edged fractals comprised of light and shadow. Jean and Marco sat at the furthermost corner table, chatting over sandwiches and cool glasses of iced tea. At this point in the day, it wasn't very likely that any great influx of customers would be arriving, and they had the place to themselves.

 

“So, have you ever been out to the east coast?” Marco inquired, brown eyes round with interest. “I've heard all sorts of wonderful things about it from people passin' through.”

Jean nodded as he took a big bite of sandwich. “I went once, when I was little and daddy was still around. I was too young to remember much, though.”

“I'd love to see New York City,” Marco said wistfully, leaning his cheek on one freckled hand.

“Have you ever left Texas?” Jean wondered aloud, studying his boyfriend intently. It seemed ridiculous to him that someone might not travel; it was practically his entire life.

“No,” the other admitted, almost guiltily.

“Never? Never ever,” Jean continued incredulously, angular eyes wide.

“No, okay!” Marco replied sharply, black brows drawing sharply down over brown eyes. He looked away and took a moment to collect himself; Trost was a bit of a sore subject for him. It was where his bar was, but aside from that, it was entirely devoid of incentive to settle there.

Jean frowned at him like a disappointed schoolteacher and took a swig of tea. “We've gotta fix that.”

Marco sighed, letting out a deep huff of air. “Oh, believe me, I would if I could. I wanna get out of this godforsaken town so damn bad.”

Jean gestured for Marco to continue with the wave of a tanned hand. He could sense that a speech was coming.

Marco raked his hands through his dark silky hair and shook his head slightly as he pondered what to say. He looked around the bar frustratedly, not really focusing on any one thing.

 

“I mean, Trost is my home, you know?” Marco said. The way he spoke sounded like he was arguing with himself, and that he had had the argument many times before. “I've always been here, so it's gonna be hard to leave, but I can't let myself get stuck. I feel like I should love the place because dad was here, but he's gone now, so what's the point?”

“Maybe there isn't one,” Jean suggested, shrugging his shoulders. _I know I'd hate being tied down like he is,_ he thought to himself as he munched on another bite of sandwich.

“Exactly!” Marco exclaimed, eyes going wide. “So I need to escape this brown hellhole and find a new point somewhere not quite so— so— _dead.”_

“So escape!” Jean responded. “What's holding you back? If you wanna leave, you can always open up a bar somewhere else. People love to drink no matter where they live, Marco.”

“I've been considering it,” Marco confessed. “But where do I go? How do you know what you're supposed to do in... not Trost?” he thought aloud worriedly.

“Find a road and follow it. Pack lots of snacks.”

Marco frowned irritatedly across the table at his boyfriend and proceeded to lightly kick him in the shin. “You know what I mean, Jean.”

Jean sat for a moment and tried to think of an explanation for what travel did to a person. It was rather like a drug, he supposed; once you've seen a bit of the world, it's not enough to see anything but all of it. He didn't know if he'd ever make it across the ocean to Europe, or even back to New York for that matter, but he wanted to try someday, after his time with the Cadets was over.

 

“I really don't know what to tell you except to say that you have to live it yourself—and I know that's not really an answer, but it's true. You can't understand someplace you've never been.”

“How the hell am I supposed to _get there,_ though? I don't know anything about travel, remember? What if I get stranded in the desert or something?” He gestured animatedly with his freckled hands as he spoke.

“That wouldn't happen because you're too smart.”

“Then tell me how _you_ did it,” Marco responded exasperatedly. “How does a cowboy make enough to haul his ass all over the United States?”

Jean stiffened up for a moment when Marco said _cowboy._ After a quick second, he forced a chuckle, but it came too slow to feel natural.

“I go where the cows go,” he answered airily with a wave of his hand.

The words he'd said didn't really mean anything; they were a deliberate, desperate run for the hills. _Please don't ask me more about it,_ he prayed silently, hoping that Marco wouldn't notice.

 

Jean knew that eventually he had to tell Marco the truth about his purposes in Trost, but no time had been the right time. There had been plenty of instances when he'd opened his mouth to say something, but had immediately thought better of it and stopped before he could begin.

“You know what?” he said suddenly, before Marco had a chance to ask him any more questions, “I'm gonna go grab my sketchbook. You need anything from upstairs?”

“Grab my book, will you?”

“Sure,” Jean called quickly over his shoulder; he was already halfway to the stairs. “Be right back.”

 

A minute or so after Jean had scurried away upstairs, Marco heard a knock at the door.

He stood from his chair, abandoning his sandwich and tea upon the tabletop, and approached the door. It was strange that someone would knock at this time of day; usually people coming in for lunch did just that: they let themselves in.

“Hello?” he called warily as he opened the door up a sliver. From the other side, a young man waved at him, sporting a spotless uniform and an impressive mustache.

“Good afternoon, sir,” came the reply from the other side.

Marco pushed the door open all the way and found that the man had already extended a hand for him to shake. “And to you,” he responded cordially, taking the hand and shaking it.

“Sir,” the man began, “I come bearing bad news. The chief of police in Santa Maria has been sending us out for weeks now looking for some cattle rustlers; they got Annie Leonhardt a few weeks back. Do you know anythin' about it?”

“Not Annie?” Marco blurted out, surprised. He'd heard Reiner mention his cousin a few times before when he had come in for a pint, and he knew how close they were. From those conversations, Marco also knew that Annie didn't like it very much when people borrowed her toys without asking first. It seemed odd to him that someone would be able to pull one over on her like that.

“Yeah, she's the one,” the cop continued. “We've been trying to find these guys on her behalf for about a month. Look, I know you probably don't know anything about it, but I'm supposed to hand out these flyers. Just... tell the sheriff if you know anything, okay? I'm gonna give him one too, of course, but every little bit helps.” He passed one over to Marco, face-down, who took it without looking at it.

“Good luck finding them!” Marco called in what he hoped was an encouraging way as the policeman began walking stiffly over to the post office.

After the man left, Marco closed the door and leaned up against it. “Wonder what all this is about?” he muttered to himself as he flipped over the flyer.

When he saw the portraits on its front, Marco nearly had a heart attack.

 

Upstairs, Jean was still digging around for Marco's damned book. He couldn't find it anywhere. He'd dug in every drawer, searched beneath all the piles of their clothes from the previous evening that were still lying discarded on the floor, and combed through all the cabinets, but he still didn't see it.

 _Where are you, you stupid thing?_ he grumbled internally as he checked Marco's underwear drawer for the third time.

It was right about then that he happened to look up and see it resting on the nightstand. He let out an angry sigh through flared nostrils and picked it up, cursing all the while.

Jean ran back down the stairs, pencils, sketchbook, and regular book in hand. “Found it!” he yelled as his feet clattered on the last step.

When Marco didn't answer, he stopped.

“Marco?” Jean asked as he gingerly exited the stairwell. “I found your book—”

 

“Jean. What the hell is this?”

Jean froze where he stood, books forgotten.

Marco's eyes were red and puffy, and his breathing was shallow and hurried. His hand was shaking as he thrust the flyer in Jean's direction. _“What in the_ hell _is this, Jean?”_

_Oh no._

_Oh no oh no oh nonono NO—_

This was exactly what he'd been afraid of.

He couldn't say a word.

_“Jean,”_ Marco repeated, a little more desperately, a little more angrily, with pain coloring his voice, “Tell me this isn't you.”

“I...”

Marco's eyes were locked on Jean's. “Well?”

“Marco—”

Marco cut him off abruptly. The look in his eyes resembled that of a wounded animal, and when he spoke, his voice shook. “Don't you dare lie to me, Kirschstein. Don't you lie to me again.”

“Just let me explain—”

“IS THIS YOU?” Marco bellowed, stabbing a finger towards the picture of Jean's face on the paper. He marched forward and forced the flyer into Jean's limp hands and then backed away to the far side of the room, keeping his distance from Jean as if the other man were toxic.

Jean looked across the room at Marco with his mouth hanging open. What a sick twist of fate.

He couldn't tell him the truth.

He couldn't lie.

 

“It's me, Marco,” Jean said quietly as he stared down at the flyer. It was the same one that Armin had shown them in Shiganshina over a month before. His voice cracked and his eyes grew wet when he spoke. “And Eren too.”

“You robbed Annie?”

Jean couldn't meet his eyes. “Yes,” he replied, staring at the floor.

“When were you gonna tell me this, Jean?” Marco's brown eyes were flooded with tears, sticking to his eyelashes and running down his cheeks. He backed up against the far wall of the bar and then sank to the floor in a messy heap of long limbs, making no move to right himself.

Jean was silent. He didn't know what to say; there was nothing he  _could_ say that would make this better. He just stood there like an idiot, dumbfounded in the empty center of the room, utterly alone.

Marco sniffled and looked up at Jean from his seat on the floor. “Were you even gonna bother telling me?” he asked in a dangerously normal tone. “Or were you just gonna screw me every night and leave without saying anything?”

“I was gonna tell you Marco, I swear! _I swear,_ I swear I was gonna tell you, goddammit!” Jean yelled. He shoved his face into his hands and let the flyer flutter to the wood floor of the bar, where it landed, face-up and accusatory, like it was staring back at Jean.

“When, Jean? When the hell were you planning on letting me know that  _hey, by the way, I'm a goddamn outlaw,_ for Christ's sake!”

“I don't know!” Jean moaned, a miserable cross between a yell and a sob. “It never seemed like the right time, I'm so sorry, I'm so—”

“Shut up.” Marco shook his head rapidly at Jean. “Cut the shit.”

Jean's lips parted, but no sound came out.

“Do I even  _matter_ to you?” Marco suddenly asked after a moment of silence, waving his hands haphazardly about in the air. His voice quavered as he stared at Jean from across the room, eyes piercing the other man like knife blades. “When you kissed me, did you mean it?”

Jean let out a deep breath. His chest was heaving. “Marco, of course I did!  _Of course_ I did— you're wonderful, Marco, how could you not matter to me? I meant everything I said and everything I did. You know I meant it!”

“How can I know anything when you aren't even who you say you are?” Marco mumbled, as if he was trying to convince himself of something. He hiccuped and wiped his running nose on one sleeve. “Is Jean Kirschstein even your real name?”

_“Yes,_ Marco. This is me; you know me. I just have a different job than you thought,” Jean pleaded.

Marco shook his head again and buried his face in his hands.

Both men were silent for some time. After a while, Jean took a step towards Marco against his better judgment.

Marco heard the floor creaking in protest.  _“Don't,”_ he said without looking at Jean. His eyes were focusing anywhere but the space that Jean occupied; it was like he had become a blind spot in Marco's vision. “You stay away from me.”

Jean sucked in a gulp of air, like the recoil after being punched. He felt like he'd just been stabbed in the gut, but he did what he was asked and backed away.

 

“I'll see myself out,” Jean said quietly as he stared at nothing. “But before I go... Marco, I want to be good with you. I never meant to let you down like this.”

“Please stop,” Marco muttered from the floor. “I just want to be by myself right now. Please.”

Jean walked slowly to the front door, feet dragging like they were weighed down with lead. He flipped the OPEN sign around to read CLOSED and then grabbed the handle of the door.

“I'm so sorry,” Jean whispered in a broken voice. “I'm sorry, Marco. I'll make it up to you.”

He spared one last glance at Marco's hunched form on the floor, then wrenched his eyes away and turned and dutifully walked out the front door into the blazing afternoon light. The life in Jean's kaleidoscope fantasy of a future had cracked and shattered, and now all he had left were ruined shards of glass, sparkling cruelly in the summer sun.

~ ~ ~

Marco sat curled in a ball against the wall of the bar for what felt like an eternity. After what was actually about fifteen minutes, he finally got up, cracking stiff joints and combing his fingers through his messy hair.

He stood in silence for a moment, surveying the room, breathing deeply in and out. Thankfully, the place was empty—  _damn_ Jean, being kind enough to think of changing the sign even after that episode— and Marco was suddenly slammed by a wave of loneliness.

 

He'd grown so accustomed to having Jean with him almost all the time that to be on his own again with no guarantee of the other man's return was strange and daunting.

All the same, Marco knew he couldn't go see him. Jean would probably be about to leave anyway, now that the police had found him out. He was probably about to run off again, just like he probably always had, ever since he'd been a little kid.

Marco's heart was battering against his ribs like a caged bird. It entreated him to go to Jean: what if this fight became their last meeting because of stubbornness? But Marco refused to swallow his pride. It had been trampled on quite enough today.

 

For someone who ran the only liquor joint in town, Marco wasn't really that popular of a guy. Sure, everyone  _liked_ him well enough, but he'd never had any super close friends in Trost. He'd never really fit in too well with the neighbors, and as such, there wasn't really anywhere where he could go to get a moment of peace. He didn't want to stay in the bar because he didn't want to be where Jean had been, and he couldn't go see Jean in person because he didn't know whether he'd kiss him or kill him. What was a man to do?

Marco sat down at one of the tables and thought for a minute.

Scratch that. He had one friend in town.

He could go see Reiner.

~ ~ ~

“Marco!” Sheriff Braun said in polite surprise, throwing the door open wide. “Good to see you!”

“Hey,” Marco replied quietly, barely making eye contact for a second before shifting his gaze back to his boots.

Reiner immediately knew that something was wrong. “Come in, come in,” he said invitingly, waving his hand to usher Marco into the house. Working on catching the rustlers could wait. A friend was in need.

After Marco came inside and Reiner closed the door, he ordered Marco to make himself comfortable on the ottoman and disappeared into the kitchen. He started pulling lots of things out of the cabinets and clunking them down on the counter top.

“Did you hear about those two guys they're looking for? The Maria cops came by today,” Reiner chattered, making small talk as he began preparing two steaming mugs of mint tea. The sheriff was wonderful at reading people, and he knew just what Marco needed.

“Sounds pretty crazy,” Marco mumbled.

“We've got pretty strong evidence, but no witnesses are present just yet. I know Annie's on the way, but I don't know when she'll be here,” Reiner continued. He didn't want to bring up the fact that the guy Marco had been screwing for the past two weeks was one of the prime suspects, so he kept it vague. Reiner figured that if Kirschstein and Jaeger were guilty, then Jean could tell Marco himself.

“So,” Reiner began once the tea was finished, sitting down in the armchair across from Marco, “What happened?”

Marco lifted his eyes to Reiner's. “You said you needed a witness?”

Reiner nodded slowly.

“Then I have something important to tell you.”

~ ~ ~

Reiner Braun hustled down Trost's one street, practically jogging towards the inn. Maybe if he was lucky, the innkeepers had had the sense to detain Jaeger and Kirschstein until he could get there and take them into custody.

As he ran up the road, he passed a woman in the street. A wide-brimmed hat hid her face, and a red scarf hung around her neck. 

“Ma'am,” he said as he tipped his hat, greeting her quickly in his deep, rumbling voice.

She nodded in reply, but said nothing, just studied the shiny badge on his chest as he chugged on by.

 

Mikasa Ackerman was actually walking fairly rapidly herself, but to cause suspicion by running at this point was out of the question. A few days ago, the police had swarmed Stohess with flyers, the same flyers that had been plastered all around Shiganshina when the Cadets had gotten into so much trouble in the first place.

As Mikasa neared the inn, she pulled the hat lower on her face and wrapped the ends of her scarf over her mouth and chin. No one could know she was connected with Jean and Eren; she was to be the invisible woman, pulling whatever strings were necessary in the background to ensure that the show went on.

 

By the time Mikasa had entered the lobby of the inn and paid for a night's stay, Reiner had already thundered up the stairs and was banging on the door of Jean and Eren's shared room.

They'd spent the past few minutes packing frantically, throwing whatever they could into their trunks, and were just about to head downstairs, saddle up their horses, and get the hell out of Trost when the knocking came.

“Jean Kirschstein and Eren Jaeger. Open up the door, please,” Sheriff Braun had boomed when he arrived, sounding very stressed and official. “This is the sheriff speaking.”

 

Now, inside, Jean was pacing rapidly back and forth along the length of the room, hands digging into his hair. “Shit shit shit shitshit _shit—_ ”

“Just open the damned door, Jean,” Eren begged. Threads of anger and frustration ran under his voice, and tension was clear in the taught muscles of his crossed arms. “There's no point in running now.”

Jean halted mid-step and wheeled on Eren. “But what if we—”

“There's only one door, and if you won't open it, I will.”

The knocking came again, louder and more persistent this time. “Sirs, please. On my authority as sheriff of Trost, I must ask you again to open the door,” Reiner repeated.

 

Jean's mind was functioning on autopilot. _Escape?_ it buzzed, running for him. _Escape?_ But no matter how he tried, no plausible plan emerged from his fevered brain.

There was only way out of this situation, and it was through that door, beyond which stood two hundred plus pounds of angry, muscular law enforcement, and as such, there was only one path forward.

Jean looked Eren straight in the eyes and drew himself up to his full height. “Let's do this shit.”

Eren didn't say anything back, only nodded, and Jean understood what it meant— that they were friends, that Eren cared, and that he was sorry. God, how _stupid_ to get themselves caught in this shitstain of a town after all their years spent on the run together. But it wasn't the time to think about that.

Jean nodded to himself affirmatively and then, taking a deep breath to steel his resolve, swung the door open wide. It creaked horribly on its rusting hinges as he was brought face to face with Sheriff Braun— and just behind him, observing the confrontation whilst idling in the hall, Mikasa.

Jean's amber eyes went wide.

She made a slicing motion across her throat, then opened the door to the room beside theirs and slipped inside soundlessly.

 

Jean's mind was racing. Mikasa had come to collect them, but it was too late. So why show up at all?

It couldn't matter right now. Jean had to focus on the problem at hand, or Reiner would sense that something was wrong.

“Good afternoon, Sheriff Braun,” he said chipperly, words dripping with false sweetness, like poisoned honey.

Even though everything was currently awful and upside-down, one thing about Jean hadn't changed. He still put on a sarcastic smile when his world fell apart. It was the same when he was a boy it was now: being an asshole was his last line of defense, the armor that shielded his wounds.

 

“Hello Messrs. Kirschstein; Jaeger. If you'd be _so_ kind as to give me your hands,” Reiner grunted gruffly as he grabbed two pairs of handcuffs from his belt and slapped them on Jean and Eren's proffered wrists. He took an agonizingly long time to lock them with the tiny little brass key.

“Just get it over with,” Eren complained dispiritedly, sucking his teeth. He pursed his lips and looked over at Jean. _We can fix this,_ his eyes seemed to say.

Jean didn't feel particularly reassured. He had no idea how the hell they were gonna pull this one off.

 

Reiner rubbed his rough hands together to get the ball rolling. “Okay. Let's get started, yeah?” he asked, staring down his charges.

Jean and Eren nodded in unison.

“Great. Hate to have to do this to you fellas, but here it is.” Reiner took a breath and recited the little speech he'd used throughout his entire career, filling in the holes where the names belonged.

“Suspects Jean Kirschstein and Eren Jaeger: I regret to inform you that due to reasonable suspicion of your involvement in the Leonhardt case, the two of you are under arrest.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Save a horse, ride a cowboy,  
> Save a horse, ride a cowboy. :)
> 
> I'm not gonna lie; that song is probably half the reason I wrote this story. Draw whatever conclusion you will.
> 
> Also, a quick note: as for future scheduling, it's time to get down to business to defeat the huns that are my end of year exams, but after that it is summer and I am freeeeeeeeeeeeeee! So hopefully my writing will be on time (every other wednesday like it normally is) but if not, that's why.
> 
> Good night lovely lovelies.


End file.
